She hated it.

And I realized that I was never going to get anything done ever again.

That was seven-and-a-half years ago. Needless to say, I did manage to accomplish a few things since then (including having four more children), but the terror is still fresh in my mind. So when I get comments like the one I got this past week from Mommytoo, the empathy wells up strong enough that I suddenly find the emotional energy to write a blog post even in my current postpartum state. Here’s what Mommytoo says:

I was such a mess when my baby was born. She’s 11 months and I still feel all disheveled. It took me almost 3 months to cook a full meal. We have no family nearby. I’m expecting my second and I’m so nervous how I’ll be able to do everything with 2. I wish someone would write a book about mommy scheduling… A very detailed hr by hr, day by day book. When do you fit your prayer/reading time in? Thank you for your blog. And congratulations on your new baby!

I would love it if I could tell you what to do hour by hour and day by day. Besides being a power trip for me , it would be thrilling to be able to bless you with that kind of omniscient help. Actually, a lot of people have made a lot of money telling worn-out mommies what to do when, but the problem with most of their glistening advice is that the only person who can really safely and effectively make a schedule for your family is you. (I wrote a post about some of why that is here.)

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have any ideas to pass along (which I’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone). Here’s what has been bashed into my head during my brief seven-and-a-half-year stint in the School of Hard Knocks for Mothers (and of course, other mothers may have gotten knocked around differently and so may have learned some completely different coping skills, which I hope they’ll share, too):

The First 40 Days are Sacred, or This, Too, Shall Pass, Maybe Even by Tomorrow
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, the best advice I got on new-mommyhood was “The first month is the hardest.” During the first 40 days, you are recovering from labor, your milk supply is getting established, your baby is adjusting to life outside the womb, you are both getting breastfeeding figured out, your family is adjusting to the new little person, and life is changing on an almost daily basis. Plan for this beforehand. If at all possible, get your house extra clean before the birth so you can coast a while after, stock your freezer with meals, and once the baby’s born try to accept as much help as possible. Job One during this time is just nurturing the people in your life, especially your baby. This kills me. I always feel like I MUST get all of life established RIGHT NOW for evermore. If my house is messy that first month, I despair, thinking that it will be messy forever. If my front flowerbed is an astounding mass of tall grass and dandelions, I cry to my mother that “we’re hicks, just hicks” (yeah, that one happened last week). BUT, I know from experience that actually, despite the postpartum insanity that puts such nonsense into my brain, actually things level out considerably after 40 days (and then again even more around four months). Those early days are just about surviving and establishing relationships, NOT housework. And stuff that seems horrendous has a way of just vaporizing when you least expect it.

Make Full Use of Prime Time
Once you’re past those first 40 days of healing, cuddling, and adjusting, you may be feeling like you want to start getting your new life organized. This is where scheduling really comes into play, and it’s also a major mental adjustment. Suddenly a lot of the times that used to be the most logical for you to do certain things lose all connection to your new reality. Take dinner prep for instance. Most people without babies prepare dinner right before it’s time to eat dinner. But with a new baby, this is a sort of Russian roulette. Just when you want to be zooming through your kitchen whipping up something nourishing and tasty, your little snuggle bunny is likely to put in an urgent request for a gourmet treat of his own, and you’ll find yourself nursing to fill his belly while yours growls. Instead of being tied to your old view of logical times, your baby’s rhythms become your new logic. If your baby is really happy to sit in his swing first thing in the morning or he takes a good nap in the early afternoon, that is when you do your dinner prep. Know in advance what you are going to make, and do everything you possibly can ahead of time when your baby doesn’t need you. Brown your meat, mix your batter, cut up your vegetables, load the stuff in a crock pot if you’ve got one, get everything all set for a quick and easy one-armed throw-together at the last minute.

And don’t forget that nursing times are prime times, too. That first early morning nursing is a great time for prayer and Bible reading. Other nursing times throughout the day are wonderful for reading to older children, planning meals, checking e-mail (especially if you’ve got a laptop), making phone calls, and teaching homeschool.

You basically have three categories of daily life with a new baby. There’s stuff you can do while nursing, stuff you can do easily while holding your baby, and stuff that you really need to have your hands free to do. The key here is knowing which tasks fit which category (with my second baby, I actually made three lists) and then picking a task every time your baby’s status changes. At first, you’re probably not going to have an awful lot of housework in that middle category (stuff you can do easily while holding the baby), and that brings me to my next idea…

Think Like an Amputee
One of the hardest things for me about being a new mother was that my baby didn’t like to be put down. And that was a big problem because I had spent my entire life with two arms, and now I suddenly only had one. I figured that since I had always used two arms for everything from laundry to dishes that I needed two arms to do those things. But I was forgetting about amputees. Every day thousands of people face the one-armed life, but rather than dissolve into permanent inability, frustration, and despair (usually), amputees get occupational therapy so they can learn to do all their normal daily activities with only one arm. And if amputees can learn, then mommies can, too. I still remember how I just didn’t get it when an older, experienced mother brought me dinner after my first baby was born and tried to tell me how she held her babies with one arm and wiped counter tops with the other. I thought I could never do that. Now that I’ve had some years to practice, I know how to do laundry, sweep the floor, help my toddler use the potty, make beds, file paperwork, and do many other things I never would have thought possible while holding a baby. It’s slower with only one arm, but it can be done. The trick is first believing that it’s possible and then strategizing creative ways to tackle each task. If you can learn to just keep plugging away at things even with only one arm, you’ll find that you accomplish a lot more than you ever thought you could even while taking care of a needy baby.

And, just like amputees get to have some special equipment to help them out, there’s some great equipment out there for mommies, too. I’m talking about those soft carriers that keep baby close and make him feel like he’s being held while leaving your hands mostly free. These are things like Moby Wraps, Mei Tais, Snugglis, and slings (the SlingEZee is my favorite). Different people find that different carriers work best with their body types, so it’s great if you can try out your friends’ carriers before you buy one. A carrier that you and your baby both like will be your BFF, allowing you to fold laundry, heft around new treasures at the resale shop, and help your toddler get on the swings at the park. You can even learn to nurse in them, which is how I managed to march my four older children around the Creation Museum when our new baby was five days old. (For me, those first 40 days MUST include a lot of distraction because I am a quivering ball of hormonal adjustment and just sit and cry whenever I’m alone.)

Plan, Reassess, Rinse, Repeat
This is what ties it all together. Adding a baby to your life is a huge change requiring a lot of adjustment, and you need to do a lot of planning to make your new life work. The problem is that your first plan will probably fail. At that point, instead of getting discouraged, look carefully at how the plan failed and make a better plan instead. Did you plan to run errands in the afternoon while your baby slept in his car seat, only to have him wake up wailing the minute you carried him into the grocery store? Try something different next time, like shopping at a different time of day or transferring him to a sling for his nap. (This is a real example from my life–it actually took me weeks of defeat and frustration before I figured out that my babies won’t sleep in their car seats in stores, but they’ll nap beautifully in a sling.) Decide what you need to do, and keep trying until you figure out how to get it done.

There are very few things that a mother with a baby truly cannot accomplish with some strategy, creativity, and lots and lots of trying again. And who knows, maybe one day you’ll find yourself as competent as I’d imagined I’d be before that fateful evening when my daughter shattered the air and my illusions with her pitiful wail from the bouncy seat. Managing a house with a new baby is rarely as simple as we’d like it to be, but it can be done.

Before I go into what it is, though, I want to return to my ground rules for controversy. This is something that makes people very emotional. Some of the worst, most uncharitable judgment, condemnation, and pride in Christian parenting circles orbits this issue. So here’s my rule: We debate ideas, but we love people. And unless there are some sociopaths reading this blog, it can safely be assumed that we all love our children and genuinely want what is best for them.

OK, so that myth I was talking about. It goes something like this:

The Myth: The secret to relaxed, happy mothering is putting your babies on a predetermined feeding and sleeping schedule from infancy. Demand feeding leads to stressed out, exhausted, unhappy mommies who are at their babies’ beck and call. (The other half of this is that demand feeding produces demanding, fussy children who don’t know who’s boss. I shared thoughts on that part here.)

The problem with this, and the reason I say it’s a myth, is that while following a schedule from a book has worked out very well for a lot of people, it has also hurt a lot of people. And though a schedule is simply a tool, a means to an end and not the end itself, following one is often treated as The Test of Good Mothering. I want to unpack this whole “schedule as panacea for Mommy stress” idea just a little.

First of all, let’s be sure what the real problem is. Nursing a baby on demand is not inherently stressful. The main reason for the “don’t demand feed–you’ll be stressed” advice is all the other stuff that’s going on in a mother’s life and the perceived effect of demand feeding on her ability to cope. The root cause of most of the rough times mothers with new babies face can be summed up with one word: adjustment. If this is your first baby (and sometimes even if it isn’t), you have to adjust to being completely responsible for another human being. Your freedom is cramped. Your decisions become weighty, even little decisions like when to shower, or exercise, or go out to eat. Our marriages are often in flux as both husband and wife adjust to changing roles and the strain that postpartum recovery puts on intimacy. Many of us are adjusting to breastfeeding, which for a lot of new moms, is really, really hard, and they’re shocked by feelings of inadequacy and failure. We’re adjusting to interrupted sleep. Our houses are messier, or at least just more cluttered with baby stuff. And we might be looking a little messier, too, as we figure out how to adjust our beauty regimens to our new levels of energy and time. We may be adjusting to the new needs and patterns of a toddler who’s dealing with not being the baby anymore. Some women who quit their jobs to be home with the baby are adjusting to being home full time. Then of course, there’s that often under-acknowledged mammoth of all adjustments, the adjustment to being off your high levels of pregnancy hormones. (Heh. When you can’t get through one of your kids’ library books without crying, you know it’s serious.)

People figure that demand feeding will make all this worse. They imagine a chaotic environment in which the mother is trying to cope with all these adjustments, but she never knows what’s going to happen next with her baby. She’d just be starting dinner, or sorting through the overwhelming clutter, or heading outside to admire her husband’s new chicken coop, when Waaaaaaaah!. Baby Dear wants to nurse. Mommy has to sit down with her Boppy pillow for forty five minutes while the rest of her complicated, off-kilter life goes on hold.

A schedule seems like it would solve a lot of that. It takes so much of the adjustment out of adjustment. You can see on paper what your day will look like and strategize about how you’ll fit everything in. Ah. I’ll take a shower at 7:00 before the baby’s scheduled to wake up. I’ll read to Darling Displaced Toddler at 10:30 during the baby’s scheduled nap, have dinner on the table at 6:00 before the baby’s scheduled feeding time, and snuggle with Ever Valiant Yet Slightly Lonely Hubby at 8:00 after the baby’s scheduled to be done nursing and asleep. Neat and tidy. You could even plan out your postpartum life before the birth!

But is an external schedule that you impose on your baby really the best way to buy yourself a little predictability?

The way that most scheduling books tell you how to know when your baby needs to nurse is based on time ranges for a given age (or some books will combine age and weight). So, for example, you might read that newborns should be nursed every two-and-a-half to three hours, and that babies need to follow a prescribed pattern for sleeping, eating, and being awake. Then, the assumption is that any time the baby cries, you will know exactly what he needs because he needs the next thing he’s scheduled to need. So, if your baby already ate an hour ago, and now he’s crying, the scheduling book would have you assume that he’s tired and needs to go down for a nap. Some books will mention the feeding cues that infants show when they’re hungry, but the emphasis is on getting the baby to make it for the full time range.

Do you know what’s wrong with this picture?

It is based entirely on the baby’s stats (age or age plus weight). There’s another person here with stats. Her name is Mommy. What many people don’t realize is that, while nearly all women are capable of producing plenty of milk in a 24 hour period, there is a 300 per cent variation among women in milk storage capacity. I wrote a whole post about this, but here are some highlights. Milk storage capacity is how much milk your breasts can hold without feeling uncomfortably full and slowing production way down. Another way to think of it is simply the amount of milk available at any one time. A 300 per cent variation in milk storage capacity means that at any given feeding, a mother on the large end of the milk storage spectrum has three times as much milk available for her baby than a mother at the low end of the spectrum. OK, homeschooling math question: If these two mothers’ babies need the same number of ounces per day, can they nurse the same number of times per day? Answer: No. If the mother with the small milk storage capacity tries to put her baby on a schedule that works well for a mother with a large milk storage capacity, her baby is going to cry a lot from legitimate hunger. That’s bad for baby and stressful for mom. Scheduling books often alleviate much of this stress by telling parents to expect a certain amount of crying and offer comfort in the idea that babies who are left to cry will not suffer any psychological damage, but that’s not really helpful if your baby is actually hungry.

But if a predetermined schedule = problematic, does new Mommy life = chaos, stress, and disarray? Not at all. Let’s go back to the actual problem: adjustment. Adjusting means getting used to a new normal. It means seeing what happens over and over again until you can come up with workable strategies. Being a mother is a skill, like knitting or playing the violin, and as such, there’s a learning curve. If you are willing to go through the learning process, you can come out on the other side of the adjustment with just as much predictability and routine as you would have with a predetermined schedule, but you can be much more certain that what you’re doing is actually meeting your baby’s needs the best way you can given how your body works.

If you want to be able to schedule your day without “scheduling” your baby, there are three things you have to do. 1. Learn the typical infant feeding cues. (According to the American Academy of Pediatrics Breastfeeding Policy Statement, “Newborns should be nursed whenever they show signs of hunger, such as increased alertness or activity, mouthing, or rooting. Crying is a late indicator of hunger.”) 2. Get your baby up at the same time every day. 3. Pay attention to what happens when.

As long as you’re getting your baby up at relatively the same time every day (and as long as he’s over that first month and a half or so where your milk supply is getting established), with a little observation, you can start to predict when he’s likely going to be hungry or tired and plan accordingly. Your own milk storage capacity is not going to change from day to day, and your baby’s hunger and thirst levels are likely going to be relatively stable for weeks at a time (except during illness or teething), so as long as your schedule is regular (always getting up at the same time, always sitting down for school with your older children at the same time, etc.), you will most likely be able to see a pattern develop. You have to continue to watch your baby for cues, though, because he may need to nurse more often if he’s about to have a growth spurt or is needing more fluids because he’s getting sick. In that case, you might have a few days when you’ll need to do things in a little different order. But overall, you can very much get used to what your baby’s needs are, and can structure your days so that you are able to get things done.

At this point, you’ll be right where a scheduling mother is. Scheduling books are simply a shortcut that skips the observation phase. Rather than getting your own data based on the real interplay between your body and your baby’s needs, scheduling books hand you “data.” Those “data” are perfect for some people and are exactly what they would have found if they’d done the observation themselves. But for other people, they are light years removed from their baby’s actual needs and don’t work well at all. The goal is happy, well-functioning homes where everyone’s needs are met, and we don’t necessarily have to all get there the same way.

I used to find the debate frustrating and bewildering. I knew what I believed in my heart, but I was disturbed by so many other Christians who just as strongly believed something else. Then a couple of years ago, I stumbled across some information that finally helped me understand how people could have such enormously different experiences with feeding their babies.

Breastfeeding is a supply and demand process, and the way the “demand” is communicated to our bodies all depends on something near and dear to the hearts of countless women: storage space.

Think of it in terms of your kitchen counter. Imagine you and a friend are working in the kitchen serving up ice cream for a church party. You’re scooping out bowls of ice cream, and your friend is carrying the bowls to the hungry people. Well, imagine if every time you filled a bowl, it was instantly passed to someone, and maybe your friend was even standing there a moment, waiting for you while you scooped. You’d probably be working as fast as you could, dishing up ice cream at lightning speed. But what if your friend started walking around with a couple of bowls, and she couldn’t find anyone who needed any? You might notice that your filled bowls were starting to accumulate on the counter. In fact, you might be running out of space to put them, and by then, you certainly wouldn’t be feeling any pressure. You might look around, stretch, chat for a minute, etc., maybe even stop entirely, and have some ice cream yourself! Your “ice cream bowl production” slows to match the speed with which the bowls are removed from the counter.

It’s just the same with your breasts. It turns out that empty breasts “hurry” and make milk at a rate of about two ounces per hour, while full breasts slow way down and only make milk at a rate of 1/3 of an ounce per hour (and it’s a good thing they slow down production because otherwise we might explode). (Learn more here.) Put another way, empty breasts make six times as much milk in an hour as full breasts do. If your breasts are full, you have to empty them before you can make very much more milk. If healthy women are emptying their breasts regularly, they can have what is for all intents and purposes an unlimited supply (giving them the ability to nurse twins or even triplets).

Now, here’s where the storage space comes in. Imagine you’re back in the kitchen at your church party. How many bowls of ice cream are you going to fill before you give up on your friend and quit? It might depend on how much space you have on your counter. If you live in a farm house with acres of counter top spreading out before you, you might fill eight or ten more bowls before you decide to give up. But what if you live in a tiny newlywed apartment with barely enough space between the dish drainer and the coffee maker to cram in more than about two bowls? Are you going to fill ten? Not likely. You’ve got no place to put them.

Breasts are just the same. All women can make plenty of milk for their babies over a 24 hour period, but the amount that the breasts can hold without feeling uncomfortably full and needing to be emptied varies greatly. There is a 300% variation in milk storage capacity (counter top space) among women (Learn more here). We’ve all got a nice freezer, a Costco bag of plastic bowls, and a perfectly functional ice cream scoop, but how many bowls can sit on our counters before we stop filling them is not the same. If we don’t get the milk emptied out of our breasts, production will grind to a halt.

Now, think about something else. Chances are, all that “emptying” is going into your baby’s little tummy. That’s his food and drink for the day. So, that 300% variation also means something else. It means that when two babies nurse and take in almost all the milk each of their mothers has at any given time, the babies are actually getting different amounts of milk. Therefore, in order to take in exactly the same number of ounces of milk per day, two babies with different mommies are going to have to nurse two different numbers of times. It’s sort of like plate sizes at an all you can eat buffet. If your friend has a turkey platter for a plate, she’ll only need to go through the line once to get enough to fill her up. But if you have a salad plate, you’ll need to go through the line several times to get enough. And babies have different metabolic rates and activity levels, not to mention different sized little bodies! All these things have an effect on how many times they need to “go through the buffet line.”

OK, enter the schedule. Let’s say you buy a book that your friend said worked great for her, and the book says your baby should nurse every three hours or so, and that he shouldn’t need any more than that. You try your best to follow the book, but pretty soon, it appears that you’re not making enough milk. What happened? Storage space strikes again. Your breasts filled up, didn’t get emptied, and slowed production. If women have a 300% variation in milk storage capacity, then one schedule is not going to work for all of them.

This accounts for the wildly varying testimonies of different families trying to follow the same “book” schedules. I remember one father of a schedule fed baby who told me that the only problem he and his wife had was dealing with the jealousy of other parents when they heard how this dad’s baby slept through the night thanks to her wonderful schedule. But I have also read the words of other parents whose babies were on the exact same schedule who had very different experiences:

The reason why my baby was sleeping so long was her blood sugar was dropping so low she couldn’t wake up. She, in fact, was going into a coma. She may have had a pre-existing condition, but following Babywise (a scheduling book) reduced my milk supply and gave me a false picture of normal, healthy feeding and sleeping patterns, making her health problem truly dangerous. We almost lost our baby. –D.P.

After being admitted to the hospital, it took several specialists nearly 2 hours to insert an IV because his veins collapsed every time they inserted the needle due to his critical state of dehydration.

We can honestly say this was the hardest moment of our lives, knowing that our son was suffering and had been suffering for nearly three weeks because he had not been fed enough due to our foolish implementation of a feeding program taught by Prep (a scheduling program). –Jeremy, Lori & Son

We went to his 4-month appointment and he weighed in at 11 pounds, 6 ounces. He had lost nearly a pound in 2 months, where he should have gained at least 3.

I was horrified….

I still didn’t want to screw up my baby’s schedule. Mr. Ezzo (an author of scheduling books) promised me I’d have a demanding brat with “metabolic confusion” if I did. So I sadly sent my husband out for formula, and started pumping my milk to try and get my supply back up.

It didn’t work. Within a week I was feeding J. 75% formula. –K.M.

You can find links to more schedule feeding testimonies here. Of course, these are rather extreme cases, but they demonstrate graphically one end of the schedule response spectrum. And because there is such a spectrum, following a one size fits all schedule, no matter how well it worked for your friend, does involve risk. You have no idea whether your breasts will be able to store enough milk to continue to produce when feedings are spaced according to the schedule. You have no idea whether your baby will be like the daughter of the schedule feeding dad I knew or like one of the babies in the tragic stories I just quoted.

So, if your baby’s nursing needs can’t be predicted by an external schedule, how do you figure out when your baby needs to eat? Well, pretty much the same way you figure out when your older children need to eat. Not when they get so hungry that they’re crying (crying is actually a late indicator of hunger, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement, Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk) but long before then, when they either wake up, or when they say politely, “I’m hungry, Mommy, may I have a snack, please?” How does a baby who can’t talk tell you politely that he’s hungry? By making nursing cues, any kind of “increased alertness or activity, mouthing, or rooting,” according to the AAP, what we call at our house a “nursey face” –smacking his lips, opening his mouth, turning towards you, sucking on a fist or your shoulder or cheek. My current baby has always tried to throw herself down into nursing position when she wanted to nurse, taking a sudden sideways dive toward “lunch.”

Let your baby’s behavior tell you when it’s time to hit the buffet line, and keep that ice cream scoop going by keeping your counter tops clear.