A book review of Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, 2016, London: Little Brown.
It’s no secret that many of us find it difficult to find space to do the deep thinking that we need to push forward our work — our paid work, but also our self-work, or the work we want to do to for a personal project. Cal Newport, like many others, connects this with our constant connectivity and the dearth of focused quiet time we might clear in our lives each day. Indeed, many of my readers will be accessing this blog post via Facebook or Twitter (around 80% of you do so), and you may have clicked on this link while standing in a queue, waiting for an event to start, or even while distractedly listening to your kids tell you about a random dream they had last night. Some of you may have clicked on this because you got to a tricky bit in your academic writing work and decided to ‘have a break’ by scrolling through your feed.
Well, this is the kind of behaviour Newport is arguing pathologically reduces our ability to focus. And he is not alone. Indeed, there isn’t a week that goes by when my Facebook or Twitter feeds do not show a research article explaining the impact of social media on our ability to focus. My favourite news site, The Conversation, shows up 4 pages of articles when you search for Social Media, many of them on social media addiction, the social consequences for teens, and the effects of increasing distractedness. But it is not just social media that is distracting, Newport lists a whole area of work he describes as ‘shallow work’:
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
It is not hard to see that this entails almost all administrative tasks and indeed, most care-work too. He contrasts this with deep work:
Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
For those of us who are academics, this sounds like heaven — imagine distraction free time to work on our writing and research — or even for teaching preparation. Newport’s basic argument is that we should intentionally make time for Deep Work and contain the amount of time Shallow Work takes up in our professional lives.
Firstly, I will say that on principle I agree with Newport completely. I find the 50+ emails I get each day completely overwhelming and distracting and both anger and anxiety producing. It is easy to whip off a quick email or cc someone into something FYI, but each of those emails appears equally in line with super important emails, and must be dealt with somehow. If I answered every email I got every day, I would never get anything else done. I agree that we need to shift our ‘hub’ outside of our inbox, and more intentionally structure our days around the work we need to do to produce value.
This is all good and obvious advice, and has been floating around academic circles in a variety of ways for years: my number one favourite article on organising the academic life is The Awesomest Seven Year Post Doc: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the tenure track academic life; The Thesis Whisperer has a whole category for ‘Getting Things Done’ that keeps us up to date with planning and organisational strategies including time blocking for deep work; Alison Miller’s Finish your dissertation: How to Overcome Psychological Barriers, Get Results, and Move on With Your Life set me up with most of these concepts during my doctoral study years (completed while having two children and a full time job). Indeed, I even learned some of this in a session on study skills in my last year of high school, and from subscribing to ‘The Fly Lady’ in the early 2000s in an effort to get my housework under control. (I wonder if you have noticed what I have done here? Did you notice all these women thinking and writing about this issue?).
And this brings me to the niggling annoyance with reading Newport’s book. On the one hand, I want to give it to every graduate student I supervise and say ‘HERE. THIS. DO THIS.’ But on the other hand, it is distressing to see that Newport’s book is a particularly masculinist take on productivity. I think I’d feel better if the book was called ‘Deep work for men’ and just left it at that, and we all used my other sources which are more applicable to both men and women. What exactly do I mean by ‘masculinist’? I mean, a view of reality that is primarily based in the male experience but presented as universal — and to this we could no doubt add ‘white’ and ‘middle class’.
My concerns are based around the following: Newport ignore’s women’s deep work; Newport ignores power relations; and Newport creates a false dichotomy that devalues care-work. I’ll finish with some thoughts on how we can enable deep work on a more collective level.
There are only about three examples in the whole book of women doing deep work, which a) perpetuates the stereotype that women are better at shallow work and are not cut out for this kind of work and b) immediately makes me suspicious of who is doing the ‘shallow’ care work that enables these men to focus on their deep work. Who looked after Carl Jung’s family while he was building his house in the woods? I immediately googled ‘was Carl Jung married?’ and look what I found on Wikipedia within five seconds.
Emma Jung (born Emma Rauschenbach, 30 March 1882 – 27 November 1955) was a Swiss Jungian analyst and author. She married Carl Gustav Jung, financing and helping him to make him the prominent psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology that he became, and had five children with him. Enduring his infidelities and mood swings, she was his “intellectual editor” to the end of her life.
This made me very, very sad. I’ve never heard of Emma Jung. I imagine she was at home trying to manage her own intellectual deep work while also looking after the five kids while Carl was off in the woods building his tower and doing his deep work. Lucky Carl. Too bad Emma. Which leads me to my second point:
Some people are able to do longer stretches of deep work more easily than others. These are normally people who have someone to take care of much of the shallow work in their lives. For example, married men (research shows women in heterosexual relationships still do the majority of domestic organisational work). Or just men — in academic departments, academic women seem to take on a larger administrative load too. Why is this? Well, for one thing, the hard nose rules Newport recommends are more difficult for women to implement without negative effect. When Newport or the MIT professors he cites turn down an administrative task that contributes to the collective, who takes it up? Who is the coordinator for the graduate students? Who organises the learning and teaching committee? I recently went to a College of Science wide meeting of postgraduate coordinators, and bar one person, ALL of us were women, in a college/faculty where the majority are men.
This is not Newport’s fault — and Newport is obviously not a social scientist so hasn’t been trained to think about power relations. But still, it’s there. Do we choose to do these jobs and therefore just need to ‘try harder’ with prioritising ‘Deep Work’? Maybe, but I’m guessing that it’s because the standards men and women are held to are different. My husband and I often joke that if he turns up to drop the kids off at school and their faces are unwashed and hair unbrushed, people are like: “oh, it’s so great you make time for your kids”. If I was to drop them off like that, people would be more like “Are you drunk?”. The standards imposed on women with regards to so-called shallow work are higher. Newport and others who are white middle class men might have a bit of an advantage when drawing a hard boundary line. People expect male professors to be useless with communication and take it as an example of their intelligence. People expect women to be responsive and caring, and if they come across as useless communicators, well, it’s seen as ditsy or distracted. If they are hard-nosed about boundaries, especially with regards to family life, they can be seen as ‘uncommitted to the job’. Which brings me to my next point.
I fully agree with Newport’s goal to increase and set aside time for Deep Work. But I don’t think it is helpful to do this by calling everything else ‘Shallow Work’. To lump social media in with care-work is really not accurate or helpful. Indeed, as philosopher Sara Ruddick argues, care-work and mothering can produce a particular kind of cognitive style that consists of non-dual and concretely productive thinking. This is the opposite of ‘masculinist’ thinking, which is often dualistic and based on strict boundaries between categories (see Gillian Rose’s work for more about this). I might cheekily suggest that if Newport was doing more regular care-work in and amongst his deep work, he too might be able to develop a less dualistic style of deep thought (I have no idea what his care-load is, but he talks about finishing work at 5.30pm and spending time with his kids which implies he isn’t doing his academic work in and around them and someone else cares for them until 5.30pm).
Perhaps we could talk in the affirmative about enabling deep work, without degrading everything else to shallow work. Indeed, the seeds of this are in Newport’s book, when he describes a number of different philosophies of deep work scheduling: The Monastic Philosophy (total separation from society), The Bimodal Philosophy (separating time periods into deep work retreats and everyday life), The Rhythmic Philosophy (creating a daily or weekly rhythm that allows for deep work to be scheduled), and the Journalistic Philosophy (intentionally taking what time you have in the interstices to do deep work — I would rename this one the ‘Part-time Mother-Worker Philosophy’). Except for the Monastic mode, the others all recognise the fact that deep work is just one part of life, and helps us to think about making space for it in and among the other kinds of important work we do.
My good friend is finishing her PhD in Chemistry. She has five children, one of whom was born during her PhD. She knows the value of deep work, and structures her time so that when she gets a couple of solid hours free to work, she really focuses and gets the work done. No Facebook, no media sites or news. Very little emailing.
One of my PhD students has two children, and her husband is at home with them a few days a week. On the days that she has to do her work, she is ultra efficient. She completed her proposal and confirmation of candidature a few months into her enrolment, and is moving forward on her PhD at a pace unprecedented in our department.
In the final year of writing my PhD, I had my second child. Once she was around 5 months old, I arranged to have someone pick me up and take me to university at 8am every day. I then had four hours before I had to be home for the next breastfeed. I did as much work on my thesis in those four hours than when I worked fulltime. Perhaps more.
My point? Well, this style of work is a) familiar to mothers with time-scarcity since we have no choice but to focus intensely in the hours we have away from our children and b) relies on the carework of others oftentimes — either others taking up administrative loads we cannot meet due to our stretched schedules, or others taking up carework for a period to free us up.
To make the call for deep work relevant beyond the individual and the man, we need to think about how to enable deep work collectively. My next post will look at a number of collective enabling strategies for deep work.
Acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge Travis Dombroski for folding all the washing (noncognitively demanding, logistical-style work that does not produce value) while simultaneously entertaining the three kids (distracted, but perhaps not easily replaced) while I wrote this blog post in bed on a public holiday with the door mostly shut. He also did the dishes and hung out the washing, he adds. I dedicate this post to Cal Newport’s partner.
Ivy winds up on an alien planet and gets forcefully impregnated by a very eager alien just as soon as she leaves the ship to investigate a crash landing… get a sneak peek at all the steamy tentacle action with this excerpt from Impregnated On An Alien Planet!
Get the full story HERE!
…The climate seemed akin to that of an Earth jungle—humid, leafy, with plenty of cracks and crevices through which any number of creatures could be hiding. Every step she took away from a ship was a step away from certainty.
Something rustled in the wide-leaved bush behind her; glancing back as she took another step proved to be a mistake. Her foot fell through something, with a tendril of some sort wrapping around it and pulling her down. By the time she opened her mouth to scream, she was underground, the only source of light the hole that had been created by her arrival.
Three new tendrils came to hold her arms and other leg, keeping her spread eagle as a fifth and sixth tendril ran down her suit.
“What the fuck,” Ivy gasped, struggling to adjust to the sudden darkness. The faintest outline of bubbly, heaving walls could be made, and the tendrils gently assaulting her were a puckered red.
The groping tendrils stroked up and down the length of her body several times before settling on her breasts, coiling round them and pressing the tips against her hardening nipples.
“Don’t you—what the hell? Let me go, let me—“ something thick and hard entered Ivy’s mouth as she shouted, sending her into panic mode. Similar to the tendrils, it seemed to work as a single, long entity, but it was fatter and had a blunt tip that kept pounding against the back of her throat, ignoring her guttural pleas for mercy.
While the thick tendril fucked her throat, the thinner ones ran up to the collar of her suit, poking until they managed to slip under the tight fabric and pull until it ripped apart. Though the suits were designed to withstand all manners of assault from the outside, the engineers hadn’t considered an inside attack, probably because the women were expected to keep their helmets on as much as possible.
That was what echoed through Ivy’s head every time the tendril inched deeper into her esophagus on its downward thrust: if she’d only kept her helmet on, the creature probably would’ve grown frustrated and thrown her back up to the surface.
A frustrated groan escaped her mouth, muffled by the alien cock as the small tendrils wrapped around her bare breasts and suctioned onto her nipples, tugging at them as if in need of milk.
He turns a desert into pools of water,
a parched land into springs of water.
And there he lets the hungry dwell
– Psalm 107:35-36a
Gentlemen, imagine walking through your favorite garden, the most beautiful garden of all. Further imagine that in this most beautiful garden are some water fountains. Now picture the fountains gushing not water, but milk. Warm, sweet milk overflowing till your cup runneth over. All over this lovely garden. Stop dreaming, start tasting – or at least making moves towards tasting. You can easily make this fantastic dream a reality, depending on the woman you marry.
Autostreaming is the automatic spraying of milk from a woman’s breasts. This happens when they get so engorged that the slightest stimulation forces the milk out in a way that resembles a shower head in use, and her breasts literally become mini milk fountains. Hands-free. Fully automatic. Locked and loaded and good to go. Super Soaker everyday. From doing some research, I think I can generalize that ANR wives don’t like wasting milk. They want to see every drop go into him. I’m not a fan of waste either. I’d like spraying to only be a fun side attraction. There’s nothing like the main course, but autostreaming also happens to be incredibly erotic, arousing, exciting, beautiful — and even godly.
I’m strongly convinced that God doesn’t like dry wells, arid conditions and deserts. When listening to the radio earlier this year, a young woman working with a Christian charity — I believe it was Compassion International — said poverty was foreign to God’s original creation. It entered the world after Adam and Eve fell. She described how in the Garden of Eden, everything was available for our ancestors to eat and enjoy. I completely concur. That’s why I think breasts that are overflowing and leaking actually glorify God and point back to his original abundance prior to the Fall. Indeed, God exhorts me to let her breasts drench me at all times. Yeah, God is not at all fond of dryness.
But I have a new dilemma. Ever since the Fall, productivity/bountifulness have declined and dryness, vanity, unproductivity and waste have become our new reality. In fact, the two verses that immediately precede the italicized ones above state “He turns rivers into a desert, springs of water into thirsty ground, a fruitful land into a salty waste, because of the evil of its inhabitants.” So although the original dilemma mentioned in Skydiving without a parachute has been resolved, a new one has replaced it: how can I be certain that even if the primary hurdle of having her agree to an ANR has been cleared in the first place, that she would also be capable of meeting my erotic fantasy* of autostreaming/leaking, upon which I’m convinced God smiles when used as an “outlet” for a wife’s blessing?
What if I finally find her, and she gladly agrees to an ANR only to produce a few drops? This has cost me some worry and concern, even sin. An agreement to an ANR isn’t sufficient. The couple must also agree to do whatever it takes to maintain a good supply.
I’m reminded to keep things in perspective. “Son, you’re jumping the gun,” God seems to warn me at times when I get anxious. “You’ve never even been married and don’t know for sure if you’ll eventually be in an ANR. You just might die tomorrow.”
True, only God knows the end of my days and I just might die tomorrow. But I do know that statistically, I’m likely to live a few more decades and get married. As discussed in Skydiving, faith without works is dead, so I did some research in order to maximize my chances of finding a woman who meets my preferences. I have investigated some non-sinful sources (and most regrettably, some sinful ones too**) and will present my findings.
Another reason I feel I should be rest assured — but I’m not always — is I know that if future Mrs. Prov519 and I don’t give up, nurse often, she drinks lots of water, uses all the herbs available, we stick to a strict nursing schedule, (as lactation operates on a supply and demand basis), we’ll have some success getting her supply up. And if all else fails, there’s Domperidone.
For those of you who don’t like taking prescriptions, I listed it as a last resort precisely for this reason. It undoubtedly produces results, though. I’ve heard and seen pictures of the difference it makes.
But prevention is better than cure. Before even getting to that stage, it’s critical to discuss this with your would-be spouse. From now on, I’ll augment my three-point plan mentioned in Skydiving. There, I said I’ll only bring up the topic of ANR once, and if she agrees, that’s it. No more testing the boundaries by discussing it before marriage.
Now that I’m a little more mature and experienced in discussing this erotic lifestyle with potential wives, I feel more confident in talking about some of its more erotic aspects. So on my next date, after she agrees to an ANR, the next hurdle would be to ascertain that she’s likely to have a large supply. And how on earth did I go about finding that out without sinning? I’d like to think I have the profile of the ANR-likely woman nailed down by now, but what about that of the abundant wellspring-likely woman? This question cuts to the heart of my dilemma over the past 12 or so months.
From my research, I’ve seen that the key to a woman’s ability to overflow is engorgement. It’s her having such an excessive milk supply that she’s easily and frequently engorged. Having large and responsive breasts, nipples and areolas is also of secondary importance. Henceforth, I plan to tell future dates about this concern. I’ll mention that having an overabundant supply is important to me, a discussion that would have been inconceivable back when I was a legalistic Puritan. Of the last four times I introduced Couples Nursing to ladies, despite being godly women, two had no problem mentioning the word “nipples.” Sigh of relief. Not all Christians are a bunch of uptight prudes.
I have struggled with this new dilemma, albeit to a lesser degree than the original. I was especially concerned about a potential slippery slope, since the flesh never quits. If I’m wondering how responsive she is in her erogenous areas and wanting to discuss it on the first few dates, who knows what’s next, perhaps I’d want to see those erogenous areas and “find out for sure,” and you and I know the progression from that point on won’t be pretty. God won’t be smiling.
As I just said two paragraphs above, I have been on a date with a godly woman who has volunteered some of this information about her own breasts. While considering my ANR proposal, she candidly told me that she had sensitive breasts, which might be considered inappropriate information by some believers, especially for the first date. No physical boundaries were pushed, however, and nothing sinful happened. I didn’t immediately start picturing her breasts or having sex with her in my imagination, as many puritanical Christians would fear, and when we parted ways, I was able to exhort her to purity (by advising to only visit sites like Christ-centered ANR : )) and she really liked the idea of Couples Nursing. So this gives me confidence that it’s possible to take the conversation to this slightly higher level without sinning.
My renewed struggle makes us revisit the fact that Christians can sometimes be caught between a rock and a hard place. Almost all of us have certain desires, kinks or fantasies that are best left out of corporate worship and ecclesiastical discussions, especially when kids are in attendance. But unfortunately, they get left out of the church completely. I believe that in mature, small group settings, we should be able to discuss such struggles tactfully. When it comes to sex within marriage, God is extremely liberal, while He’s ultra conservative with regards to sex outside marriage, and we ought to have exactly the same approach but the problem is we tend to blur the line and conflate the two statuses, as the outside-inside tension and dramatic shift in God’s disposition toward sex depending on one’s marital status can create bewilderment and confusion for those of us believers with uncommon bedroom desires. “What if you marry someone then later find out you don’t like the sex?” asked a very liberal coworker that teaches Sunday school classes in a very liberal denomination. My response was that God in His matchless wisdom has equipped us to discern who we’re very likely to greatly enjoy sex with, even before marriage. But those of us with less common desires like Couples Nursing are in a quandary, more so if we also desire features like overabundance/spraying. In God’s design, marriage is only meant to happen once, thus the importance of making a careful decision and ensuring that our non-negotiables are met can’t be overstated.
In my quest to resolve this new dilemma, I’ve recently realized that the bottomline is doing some honest, Spirit-led introspection by asking myself how marrying a woman capable of overabundant letdown enhances my marriage biblically. What advantage would such a woman have over a godly one who makes enough milk but lacks this ability? How does a milk-spraying and overflowing wife make my marriage godlier, and paint a better picture of Christ and His sacrifice for His Bride?
My answers are as follows. First of all, in the Old Testament, God repeatedly refers to the Promised Land as the land flowing with milk and honey. (Exodus 3:8; Numbers 14:8; Deuteronomy 31:20; Ezekiel 20:15) [1]. Secondly, as mentioned in the third paragraph of this post, an ANR that entails overabundant letdown would enable us to better appreciate God’s providence and bountiful blessings on the marriage relationship. Consider Isaiah 66:11, where God says: “That you may nurse and be satisfied with [Jerusalem’s] comforting breasts, that you may suck and be delighted with her bountiful bosom.” We have even more examples of God doing things like raining down manna on the Israelites and Jesus feeding several thousands and having 12 basketfuls leftover.
Further, in John 2:6, Christ turned water into wine. Between 120 and 180 gallons of wine to be precise. If God weren’t a proponent of overflowing abundance, why would He choose to bless a brand new marital union by miraculously creating between 454 and 681 liters of wine?
Therefore, we can surely conclude that God views an abundance of nourishment as a great blessing.
Because Christ has ransomed His Bride from death with His very own blood, she owes Him her complete allegiance and must bear fruit for Him, see Ephesians 2:10.
In an analogous way, after a long hard day’s work providing for her, I’d like a wife who reciprocates by raining down her best on me. It truly is a beautiful thing when a wife wants to bear abundant fruit for her dear hardworking husband who loves her like Christ loves the Church.
Also, keep in mind that one of my biggest reasons for desiring Couples Nursing is to have my wife physically becoming part of me. The more of her in me, the better.
Likewise, the Spirit of Christ doesn’t partially indwell me. God doesn’t believe in half-hearted efforts. The only reason observers are able to see partial Spiritual fruit is my sin. My rationale is ‘why settle for a wife who can partially fill me if I can marry one that can fill me to the brim?’
And to put it quite simply, overabundant letdown/autostreaming is fun and exciting and a woman who can do that has an advantage over one who can’t.
I hope I’ve been able to convince you of the divine, biblical validity of engorged, overflowing, autostreaming breasts and how they are a sign of God’s blessing.
Single guys, from doing some** non-sinful research, I can confidently tell you that the women who produce the most milk and can therefore autostream more than the rest are Oriental Asian. But don’t book your flights to Tokyo just yet. They seem to make a lot more thin, watery foremilk than creamy, nutritious hindmilk, which I’m guessing is related to their diet. (DISCLAIMER: gentlemen, this useful bit of info is only meant to provide guidance to the single Christian man who longs for a solid Christian woman that meets his desires. If it causes you to lust or objectify Asian women, I can’t be held responsible.
I think the rules can be bent in this case for the sake of mercy and prudence, to prevent the believer from being sexually unfulfilled for the rest of his life after getting married. My study Bible notes about 1 Samuel 21:4-5, where the priest gave a famished David the holy bread which was only for consumption by priests: “Ahimelech was bending the rules, since only priests were allowed to eat the bread, and only in a holy place. However, Jesus endorsed Ahimelech’s judgment in putting mercy before ceremonial law.”)
If only the translators of Proverbs had maintained a high degree of fidelity to the original Hebrew, the entire dilemma described herein could have been averted. Had I known that God directly exhorts me to “let her breasts drench me,” such knowledge would have saved me a lot of time and sin. God does not equivocate, so “let her breasts drench you at all times” means “let her breast drench you at all times.” God is very liberal and permissive indeed when it comes to marital sex, and we ought to be the same way.
When with my future wife, I would love her to be an overflowing fountain of blessing, and us making her overflow one of the highlights of our Adult Nursing Relationship. I want to take highly confidential, tightly secured pictures and record videos : ) I want to drink from her overflowing abundance.
Footnotes:
*I’m cautious about using the word “fantasy.” Elder T advises against holding on to any fantasies due to Philippians 4:8: “…whatever is true … think about such things.” He has my vote, except for one qualification. I agree that the Bible teaches to focus more on the here and now rather than worrying about the unknown future, but I think some fantasies can be realistic. Ladies, if you’re waiting for an extremely handsome and godly multi-billionaire to sweep you off your feet and tell you how much he loves you every hour on the hour, 24 times a day, that’s probably not gonna happen. Guys, neither is the desire to find a Baywatch babe turned Christian who wants to have sex with you seven times a day. But if you hope (without obsessing) for an attractive Christian gentleman who wants to drink your essence daily, or a godly, well-endowed woman who would love to drench you everyday, then you’re on solid ground. They do exist. I’ve met some. I could be married to one right now if it weren’t for the inadequate chemistry. There’s a difference between exotic but realistic, and wild and imaginary.
** Christians looking for resources on ANR are often in an exceedingly difficult position. It’s a beautiful gift that’s biblical but also sexual and not highly looked upon in our day so it’s a challenge to avoid visiting disgusting sites. We need a lot more clean and Christian ANR resources so we can forgo any “insights” that the dirty ones may offer.
1. Why was Israel called the land of milk and honey? Got Questions
See also:
Let him drink deeply of your overflowing abundance
Super-producing mom donates 600 gallons of breast milk
Sometimes we get some pretty great questions from listeners of the podcast. Recently we had a mom email us with questions about traveling with a breastfeeding baby. This is a pretty broad topic – there are a lot of variables here. We covered several, but I really think this is one of those things that you really don’t consider at first. I mean, you just had a baby…are you planning a trip? Probably not. However, 6 months later you may decide to pack up the car and hit the road. What will you need? What should you expect? Maybe it’s not a road trip, but you’re flying somewhere. Can you get past TSA with breastmilk (yes you can, but we talk about that on the podcast) or breastfeed the baby on the plane sitting next to a complete stranger?
We have said it over and over again; breastfeeding is not a deal breaker for living your life. You can absolutely take trips and do whatever you want to do. The bigger consideration is that you now have a baby, and that will complicate any kind of travel – it’s not breastfeeding that is a problem. You would still have to feed the baby. Could you imagine trying to find a place with clean water to make a formula bottle while running through an airport or stopping at rest stops?
As we get closer to vacation season (isn’t it always vacation season though?) you may be starting to think about these things. Check out this week’s podcast for more information and some tips on how to make traveling a breeze.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/special-procedures/traveling-children
Are you struggling with milk supply?
You’re not alone. Breastfeeding is not for the fainthearted and having low milk supply can break your heart. Luckily there are things you can do to help, like pumping, staying hydrated and eating delicious cookies. Too good to be true? Try this gluten free lactose free recipe for lactation cookies and hopefully they work for you too!
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Batch: Makes approximately 20 cookies
Preheat your oven to 170 degrees celsius or 338 degrees Farenheit
Ingredients
I’m having some food anxiety. Even though I know my body responds to exercise most.
I’m both anxious and look forward to the trip with my mom. I really need to fucking sleep though. I’m fucking exhausted.
Rip me
As an aside, sex is right back on track. Although there still can’t be any major boob stuff.
My chronic pain is shitty. Now also involving my left ovary.
Im just so hungry all the fucking tiiiiime. Because my body is basically pms’ing always
Photo by Picsea. From http://www.unsplash.com
It’s hard to believe, but my little Oscar just turned six months old. He is rolling over, trying to sit up, babbling constantly, chewing on everything, and will soon have three teeth popping through.
He loves to eat, so much so that I have been struggling to keep up with his appetite. Up until just recently we have exclusively fed him breast milk, either by nursing or giving him expressed milk in a bottle at daycare.
In the beginning my milk supply was out of control. While on maternity leave I would have to pump at least once during the day and once over night, in addition to his normal feedings. If I didn’t pump I would become engorged and leak in my sleep. It was inconvenient to have to wake up and pump, but it helped build up a stockpile of frozen milk.
Last month was an incredibly busy one at work and I was lucky to be able to pump once while at work, rather than my normal two times; indeed, most of the time I didn’t even have time for a lunch break or I used my lunch break to pump. This lead to my milk supply starting to dwindle, in both what I was producing and what I had in storage. All the while, Oscar started to want to eat larger portions. My freezer now only holds a scant three bags of milk and I find myself trying to research galactogogues to increase how much milk I am producing.
For those unfamiliar with galactogogues, they are substances, either pharmaceutical or natural, which are used to increase lactation. According to KellyMom.com, commonly used herbal galactagogues arefenugreek, blessed thistle, and alfalfa. If you look on Pinterest, you will find a wide array of recipes for cookies, smoothies, and other foods with ingredients that are also said to aid in increasing milk supply, like flax seed, oats, yogurt, brewer’s yeast, etc.
I already eat oatmeal with flax seed, chia, vegetable-based protein powder, and some Greek yogurt each morning, so I didn’t think that it was worth it to make any special “lactation smoothies ” or “lactation cookies,” although these lactation cookies look pretty fabulous.
I have also been trying to drink a lot of extra water each day in hopes that it would help make more milk.
I started with taking Nature’s Way Premium Fenugreek Seed capsules several times a day. I noticed that I started to smell faintly like maple syrup, which I didn’t mind but it kind of made me crave pancakes. After a quick Google search I found out that fenugreek is used in making imitation maple syrup, hence the smell. I didn’t see an increase in my milk supply at all for the two weeks I was taking it. Oscar started to be fussy and seemed to have a lot of gas. I had read that in some infants fenugreek can cause upset stomach, so I decided to stop taking the fenugreek supplement.
I then began drinking Traditional Medicinals Mother’s Milk Organic Tea, which I found at Wal-Mart. It contains anise, fennel, fenugreek, and coriander. I was hesitant to try it since my baby seems to be sensitive to fenugreek, but I figured with the tea I would be consuming a much smaller amount than when I was using the fenugreek capsules. So far, I have not observed Oscar having any gas or an upset tummy. I have been drinking two cups of tea during the day at work and one cup at night before bed. Luckily, it does not taste like maple syrup, something I was afraid of after trying the fenugreek. Instead, to me it tastes like chamomile with a light licorice flavor. After only two days I have seen a pretty consistent result in the amount of milk I am pumping. In a normal pumping session, I had been pumping two ounces on the left and five on the right, but after drinking the tea for a couple days I have been pumping three ounces on the left and six ounces on the right. I am going to continue drinking the tea, as it seems that it may be helping. Unfortunately, with all the extra water I have been drinking and the addition of three cups of tea, I have been making a ton of trips to the restroom.
Have you ever tried to increase your milk supply? Did anything help you? I’d love to hear from you.
Shortly after it became apparent that Hypatia was going to become the matriarch pig of Bellfern Homestead instead of Eliza as intended, her name morphed into Honeybunny. Hypatia seemed an appropriate name for a creature too smart for her earthly form who was destined for an unfortunate end, but Honeybunny seems more fitting for a mistress.
Pigs have a gestation period of 114 days, which is easy to remember with the addage “3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days.” Honeybunny’s due date was last Wednesday, but she wasn’t showing any signs of imminent farrowing (the pig-specific word for birth), which include lactation and nest-making. Finally, mid-day on day 117, she had a snack of cottage cheese and then immediately went to work moving all of the hay in her hut into a giant mound. She was moving that hay with a purpose, and we knew we were finally starting the countdown.
Nest-making usually happens within 12-24 hours of birth, so when this behavior started at 3 p.m., we thought we’d be looking at an early-morning farrowing the following day. We had a nice corned beef dinner to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, and went out to check on her after cleaning up. To our great surprise, we found her in active labor. We could see the muscles around her vulva contracting, while she laid on her side in a trance-like state. I headed back into the house to get a bucket of hot water, soap and a towel (at the good advice of James Herriott). In the time it took me to walk back to the house, our neighbor came running over to let me know the first one was out!
Pigs usually birth one pig every 10-15 minutes, so Josh and I settled in the corner of her hut, whispered encouragements, and tried to generally stay out of her way and not distract her. But then 20 minutes passed, and another 20, and I started to get concerned. One hour between piglets is the signpost for a problem. If you pass the one hour mark, and you know there should be more pigs coming, then it’s a sign of distress. At one hour and 5 minutes, I soaped up, rinsed, then thoroughly lubed my hand and arm and went in. (She wasn’t crazy about this, but wasn’t as upset as you might expect.) I was expecting to find a big fat piglet stuck just behind her pelvic bone (they were 4 days late, after all), but to my relief, I couldn’t feel anything. So I withdrew, rinsed off, and 3 minutes later a great big boarlet popped out.
From then on, the rest came in intervals of 1 to 10 minutes, and in the course of a 2 hour farrowing, we had 10 wriggling piglets! They were all born without problems, and none of them required our intervention. Nonetheless, we did vigorously rub each one and relocate to a heat lamp until mom was done to avoid getting crushed. She occasionally got up between births to gulp down water and rebuild her nest, but she wasn’t very aware of what was going on around her.
After piglet 10, she seemed to calm a little, so we brought the piglets back to let them suckle. The mom produces colostrum for the first 24 hours, so it was crucial to get them nursing as soon as possible. I was concerned she would freak out about these parasitic creatures latching onto her, but I might have been projecting my own fears. She was unphased, and they all latched on and nursed themselves to sleep.
Although the whole event was over by 11 p.m., we were concerned about the piglets getting crushed in the night by an enormous and exhausted mama, so Josh and I took turns getting up every 2 hours to check on them. Twice during the night we pulled the piglets off moma’s teats and stuck them back under the heat lamp, and she seemed to really appreciate the opportunity to get up, drink water, and relieve herself without having to worry about accidentally stepping on them.
We’re not out of the woods yet; one of the 10 is very tiny and might not survive. And accidental crushings are very common in the weeks following birth. But it’s a promising start! All of my fears about problem births and the piglets being rejected by the moma have not come to pass.
If you’re the curious sort who wonders what a pig farrowing looks like, I managed to get a bit of graphic video of her last two piglets entering the world.
