Pumping Experiment Results

The results of the pumping experiment are in. I nursed up until this morning. This morning, we had our last nurse right before getting out of bed. I wasn't quite ready to get up, so I let her nurse off of one side before I got up and changed her diaper. After she nursed, I pumped and continued pumping roughly every 2 hours for the rest of the day. Results can be seen below (of course there's a graph!).

There's a very strong correlation between time and ounces produced. Well, duh. That makes sense. Increasing time by 2 fold seems to roughly increase production by the same amount (60 minutes = 0.5 oz, 120 minutes = 0.7-0.9 oz, 180 minutes = 1.4 oz). There are also other variables that aren't being taken into consideration, such as time of day (I think anecdotally that I produce more in the morning), how much I've had to drink recently, and when I've taken medication / supplements in relation to pumping. So pumping more often doesn't produce a greater quantity of pumped milk, but it should help to stimulate further production (like tomorrow's results perhaps?)

The total pumped today is 7.3oz. Sterling consumed 24.5oz via bottle (including all of the breastmilk pumped). That's pretty much in line with what I had predicted, although the pumping results were on the low side. She took roughly 16oz of formula, which is on the high side of what she has been drinking. She is supposed to be more efficient at extracting milk than the pump is, so the results pretty much agree. I'd say that typically, she's getting about 50% of her milk intake from me and 50% supplemented via formula.

These results are sort of reassuring and depressing at the same time. I'm producing about 12oz of milk a day, which seems like a lot when I take into consideration that she only drinks 2-3oz at a feeding. However, 50% seems pretty low for the amount of effort that I'm putting into it. I pumped 8 times for an average of 17 minutes a piece. That means I spent 136 minutes of my day today attached to the breast pump.