My Life as a Cow

It should go without saying that I am udderly (yeah, that's right. A pun. A corny pun. And there's more where that came from) delighted that breastfeeding has worked with Harper since day one. The fear that it wouldn't work was right up there with my fear of a long-ass labor with ending with me being slit open at the end, and I suppose one out of two ain't bad. And while I mentioned in my last post that I overestimated the pain of breastfeeding, I forgot to say that I underestimated how strangely painful it is to be carrying around two one-gallon jugs of milk. All the time. ON MY CHEST. Without lids.

Because of the aforementioned fear, I started drinking fennel/anis/caraway tea in the last weeks of pregnancy to help get the milk factory started. And now I'm thinking about applying for subsidies from the EU, because I could seriously start selling this stuff. Long story short, I kind of overdid it with all the tea, and now I'm sitting around with ice packs on my tatas in the dead of winter. But like most things in life, the Not Partaking of the Magic Tea has a side effect: Without fennel in her life, Harper gets farty. And this makes her angry. And cry-y. Which makes me cry-y. And mainly sleepy. So, what to do? Drink fennel tea to keep the baby from bloating up like a halftime show mascot ... with the consequence being two of my very prominent body parts bloating up like halftime show mascots? Halftime at the Porno Bowl, that is.

So, I've decided to do what Homer Simpson did in that episode where he got into a steak-eating contest (You're...you're...Tony Randall!) and ended up driving a truck across the country:

Homer: Uh, yeah. I need something that will keep me awake, alert, and reckless all night long.
Clerk: Well, Congress is racing back to Washington to outlaw these.
Homer: Sold!
Clerk: Hey, you can't take that many pep pills at once.
Homer: No problem, I'll balance it out with a bottle of sleeping pills.

It'll be fennel tea for the baby, then peppermint tea to help curb production.

Good God. The things you figure out when you become a one-woman milk machine.