The day Tisoy turned 12 weeks old I had to go back to work. I love my work, I enjoy what I have been doing for the past 5 years and now I enjoy thinking about other things than the color and texture of baby poop. At the same time, I miss being with my baby. Until that day we have never been separated for more than 2 hours, now it's 9 hours a day, 4 days of the week. Luckily I have enough leave days left to take Fridays off.
I'm exclusively breastfeeding him, and that's where the pressure comes in. I thought I was under pressure meeting a certain deadline for a project? That's nothing compared to trying to keep Tisoy well fed. I wake up at 5:30 am. Sometimes Tisoy wakes me up earlier, which is good cause then I know I have enough time to feed him twice before heading off to work at 7:30. If he's not yet awake, the pressure starts already. Will he eat enough in the next two hours so that his Lola won't have to start feeding him the expressed milk only minutes after I leave and risk running out towards the end of the day?
At work the pressure continues: I have to express a certain amount of milk to get Tisoy through the day the next day. If I don't express enough, I'll risk running out of milk for Tisoy the next day. I don't have enough milk to build up stocks unfortunately. In addition, the stocks I built up when I was still at home, were all spoilt because our freezer doesn't freeze properly. So, it's an on-demand business.
Leaving work, the pressure goes on: I hope traffic will be reasonable so that I won't get home too late to find the boy crying for food. After some playtime with Tisoy, dinner, preparing the pump for the night and other chores, I pass out at 9:00pm, to wake up at midnight and 3:00am to pump more milk for the next day. If I'm lucky, Tisoy wakes up to be fed around the same time. If I'm unlucky, he wakes up in between, and I get little sleep that night.
I could make my life easier and just formula-feed him. But somehow I don't trust highly processed powered cow's milk with additives and ingredients that I don't even fully understand. Besides, Tisoy is still incompatible to cow milk protein.
The good news is that this will only continue for a few weeks. In mid-December I'll already start my leave. Shortly after, Tisoy will probably start eating his first solids, and become less dependent on my milk supply.
My current contract ends at the end of the year. Then a new type of pressure starts: Finding a reasonably paying baby-compatible job, preferably in Cebu.
