Answer to Anonymous

I still hate that Blogger doesn't do threaded comments, so I'll respond to Anonymous' questions on pumping here:

While driving to and from work can you steal some additional pumping sessions using something like a Whisper Wear pump?

My commute to work, thankfully, is really too short for this to be useful. And I do pump while at work, of course, but there's just only so many times I can do that. I'll point out that the Whisper Wear Pump has been discontinued by the manufacturer. While I don't know why, my guess is it's because it doesn't work. I actually have a Whisper Wear Pump and my experience is... it doesn't work (and, oh by the way, it's LOUD). From the reviews I can find online, it seems that it definitely does not work with women who are, uh, how shall I say... ahem... well endowed. And people who are small breasted seem to have only minimally good experience with it. I'm in the well-endowed category and I can't get a drop out of it, so I found it to be a phenomenal waste of money.

While a baby nurses from one side can you hand pump the other?

If I'm nursing only one baby, and I haven't recently pumped, I nearly always pump the other side. But I don't use a hand pump, I use my hospital-grade electric pump for that. But it also depends on whether I'm about to nurse another baby. My experience is that if I pump and then feed a baby, the baby doesn't get enough (remember that I weigh Ellie before and after feeding her, so I do have a quantitative way of measuring this), so if I'm feeding Sam and I know that I'm going to be feeding Ellie immediately afterward, I might pump for a few minutes on the other side just to get to the hindmilk stage (higher calorie), but I won't do a full pumping session. I am often, however, feeding two babies at once, so there's nothing to pump at the same time. (I've backed off on simultaneous feeding recently, because I'm finding Ellie doesn't eat as much if I feed them both at the same time... I'm not sure why this is, but it seems consistently true)

I do often pump AFTER nursing the babies, because in THEORY this is supposed to boost my supply. However, my experience is that I nearly NEVER get more than a couple cc's if I pump after feeding the babies. They're pretty good at fully draining me, which is a good thing. I can't pump after nursing them EVERY time they nurse, because, honestly, there are only so many hours in the day.