Milk Production

When we were in hospital, the midwives instructed us to keep an eye on the quantity of milk that Jack has and to take note of them, as at this point, he wasn’t breast-feeding properly. Well, take note, we did. I say ‘we’ in the lightest of sense, where I clearly mean ‘Claire’, as she ought to take the credit for doing it. Either way, we have a notebook that is located near the fridge where the milk is kept, and, after Jack has finished with the bottle at the time, we note down the time and quantity under a heading for that day.

Well. This was fine by itself for a little while, this notepad. Innocently collecting data about the child’s feeds... until the other day when I had to type it up into Excel.

I thought about getting this all typed up whilst driving home one day from work, with the wonder in my head as to the running total that Jack had consumed, but also that Claire had produced, as only on Jack’s first day did he have formula milk.

The typing took about half an hour and I can confirm that as of Jack’s four complete weeks outside the womb, he has drunk over 16 litres of milk. 16 whole litres, or 16,000 millilitres, fed initially at 40 millilitres, going up to the 125 millilitres that he’s having at present. Now – it’s easy to play this quantity down, saying it’s only 16 litres of milk, but it’s actually 16 litres of booby-juice that Claire has produced and has only produced it because of Jack... what I mean, is that this milk has come from Claire and is, I believe, the best stuff that Jack could have, compared to formula milk or anything else that you can buy at the supermarket.

That’s almost half a tank of petrol in my car...! If that was 16 litres of petrol instead of milk, I could get to work and back on that for over a week, and yet this white 'milk' stuff is coming in quantity from my wife, to be lapped up by our baby. Madness.

Now – what computer geek would I be unless I had drawn a few graphs? Not really being a whizz with Microsoft Excel, I have tried to draw a couple of graphs showing the times vs. quantity that he’s had and it’s fair to say I’ve fluffed it a little, but it’s there in essence.

Incidentally, we are able to know how much milk that Jack is having because of Claire has expressed it and we’re able to measure it in handy feed-sized bottles with markers on the side. How people who breastfeed directly are able to know how much milk a baby has had at any given time, is beyond me. How can they draw fancy Excel graphs!?!

If you're able to do something a little more constructive in Excel and you fancy drawing me a better graph with the data, drop me an email and I'll send over the Excel file - if your graph is better or more colourful than mine, I might just come back here and retro-fit it into this post!