Today marks the last day of my FMLA (Family Medical Leave of Absense). You will be six weeks tomorrow and supposedly that is old enough for me to drop you off at day care and head off to work. Um, no thanks.
Six weeks is in no way enough time to prepare you to be without your mom nor is it enough time for me to have prepared some sort of child care for you. You are a big healthy baby, you are strong, you can even pretty much hold your head up yourself, but there is one huge problem (among other nearly as important problems). Breastfeeding.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends 6-12 months of breastfeeding. They also recommend not using a bottle with a breastfeeding babies until 4-6 weeks of age. So, here we are at the conservative end of the scale, six weeks and we are starting to try you out on a bottle. By starting I mean we are following the recommended transition where you are given a (ONE) bottle a day for an entire week, then two bottles a day the next week, up to the number of bottles you need to SURVIVE while you cannot breastfeed. Let's do the math, you eat at least every two hours. In a given work day I assume I would be gone 10 hours (8 hours plus two hours of commute). That is five bottles. I would need five weeks to get you to that point of survival of an average day. I need the get off this blog and start practicing and pumping...
The persons who decided that 6 weeks was sufficient FMLA must have been male and without kids. Thanks to the lack of influence by other mothers such as me has left me in a very common situation. Tomorrow begins my first day of unpaid leave. Now, I am very thankful to have at least that. I don't have the option to become a stay at home mom at this point, but I guess I can act like one for now.
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