I’m a huge fan of breast-feeding. It helped cement a special bond between me and Olivia, as something only I could provide her. I enjoyed it for the short year that it lasted, before she self-weaned.

Before I gave birth, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. Other women would love to ask the pregnant me about my intentions to breastfeed, and then would offer their advice on the topic. It seemed like I heard a wide range of experiences, from women who hated it, to women who loved it so much, they nursed till their child was four. My doctor urged me to nurse for at least one year.

A few of the negative things I’d heard about breast-feeding surprise me now as I look back. I completely don’t relate. My longtime friend told me she felt societally pressured into breast-feeding her first child and it “ruined” her boobs. She then had a second child, and said she wasn’t going to breast-feed at all because she couldn’t stand having something “attached” to her like that. She is an awesome mother and I respect her feelings.

A couple of coworkers told me they didn’t breast-feed for very long because it was inconvenient to pump at work. Another said she couldn’t stand the pain in the first few weeks. Different people have different attitudes and there is no right answer on this topic. People have to do what is right for them.

It’s certainly more and more trendy to breast-feed. About 77 percent of new mothers breast-feed their infants at least briefly, the highest rate seen in the United States in more than a decade, according to a government survey released this year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says breast-feeding as at an “all-time high.” In 1993 and 1994, just 60 percent of new mothers breast-fed their babies, the CDC survey shows.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend that mothers breast-feed exclusively for the first six months of their child’s life and continue breast-feeding with baby food as a supplement until at least the child’s first birthday. Studies have shown that children who are fed formula have increased risks of ear and respiratory infections, obesity, diabetes and even cancer. I factored that into my choice to nurse.

My cousin Val said logistically, it would be easier to nurse an infant, because all I’d have to do is whip out a boob in the middle of the night and continue lying there. She was so right. For the first three months, I would actually wake up every three hours to feed Olivia, then put her back in her crib. Then I got smart. I slept with her so that I didn’t even have to move. I have no idea why that didn’t dawn on me sooner, but let’s just chalk it up to the half-functioning brain and the massive sleep deprivation.

That’s not to say breast-feeding was easy. It hurt like a mother for the first month. I mean, come on. Someone using your nipples for half an hour, eight times a day? All the Lansinoh in the world didn’t help the chafing in the beginning. I’d let Olivia latch on and then I’d wince for a good five minutes or so from the pain. I’ll bet that’s just one of the many times on this journey Claus was happy he is a man.

Has anyone told you about mastitis? I got that twice while nursing. Mastitis is an infection of the breast tissue that causes pain, swelling and redness of the breast. It feels like you have the flu, with fatigue, chills, and a fever – plus a sore breast. It happens a lot to nursing mothers. Unfortunately my antibiotics gave Olivia thrush (oral yeast), so the second time I got mastitis, I decided to not nurse her for a couple weeks while I took my pills. I didn’t want her to reinfect me, or vice versa.

This meant I had to wake up several times overnight and prepare bottles! It was the worst two weeks of my parenting experience. The bottle preparation, plus the sitting up and holding the baby while she ate, meant that I couldn’t sleep for 40 minutes per feeding cycle. Repeat this three times overnight.

It was such a horrible memory. I probably got a head cold after that time frame, but I was so tired I can’t remember much clearly from the first 12 months. This served to validate Val’s advice about convenience.

There was also the inconvenience of having to pump my breasts if I was away from the baby and missing a feeding. If you don’t know, lactating moms have to do that or else the milk keeps building up in the breast, and can cause… mastitis! Plus, it’s really painful.

I actually had to work my news shoots around pumping times. A couple times I planned poorly and had to resort to putting on my Mommy Cape and pumping in the news car en route to a story. Thankfully, all our photographers are really cool and I was working with the ones that I’m close to.

On weekends, when I anchor, I warned my producers that twice a night at a certain time I’d be in the bathroom pumping for 20 minutes in case they were looking for me.

A couple times I started leaking while live on air. During the peak of breastfeeding, when the baby is relying solely on the mother’s milk, one produces milk like a bovine –the first six months – and it doesn’t take much to stimulate the let-down reflex. All one has to do is think about the baby for the milk to start flowing. Either that, or if it’s really close to pumping time, leakages are possible.

They make pads and shields to guard against that, but I didn’t find it effective. Both products alter the silhouette, and the shields can also foster yeast infections by creating a warm, moist environment with little or no air circulation. Yeah, the things you learn after giving birth.

Bras are necessary to hold down pads or shields, but the constriction of the bra can also cause mastitis because it’s pushing against the milk ducts, the way a garden hose can get knotted up when you pull it the wrong way and then the water stops flowing.

One is advised to avoid underwire bras entirely, but I found bras in general can cause enough constriction to create the mastitis risk. You’ll know because you’ll get some early warning signs of hard, tender patches, which then you have to massage out with heat. I can see the innuendo jokes about this, but there is nothing funny at all about it.

But I will tell you something that IS funny. So back to the newscast leakages. It leaked through my shirt, and through my blazer, twice! I was sitting on the set with one minute till the show began, when I saw a commercial with babies. I felt a funny tingling feeling which I recognized as the let-down. I tried immediately to think about something distracting and horrible, like having to work a sixth day (ha ha).

That did not work. I saw myself in the preview monitor with a little speck of wetness. It comes out kind of fast, so within a few seconds, I heard my producer urgently saying, “You’re leaking!” One of the technicians offered to run out to the newsroom and grab my extra jacket at my desk. Paul and I were wired up with microphones and earpieces so we couldn’t easily run off. “There’s a black jacket,” I hollered as he left.

I can’t really blame a straight man for not knowing the difference between parka and suit jacket, but he returned in lightning speed to rival Usain Bolt. Unfortunately, he brought my winter parka that I keep because we have a cold newsroom. Plus, he was in a rush and all. But I really couldn’t deliver the news in Patagonia.

Chaos on the IFB. When he threw it at me on set, my technical director, Joy, was already screaming “Ten seconds! You’re going to give me a heart attack!” And my show producer, Sean, was yelling something similar.

So the tech ran out again and grabbed any jacket that wouldn’t horribly clash with the dark blue blouse I had on. He did not make it in time. We were all quite nervous now, but two seconds before air, Sean stuttered to hold my news scripts up in front of my chest like the real old-timey news anchors in pre-Teleprompter days.

Brilliant, Sean. Worked like a charm. I’m pretty sure only a few at home noticed that I opened the show in a dark blue blouse and returned from the first story with a light blue blazer over that! (Thanks for the loan, Beth!)

That wasn’t the only dramatic experience in lactation. I was on a plane to the Philippines, on assignment for KHNL, when I had a breast pump misadventure. It’s a ten hour flight and at this point in nursing, I needed to pump every six hours.

They sell all kinds of different breast pumps, but the one I own is an electric model made by the popular Medela. It has an A/C adapter, but a backup battery pack for moments like these. I bought all new batteries for the trip. But I loaded them in a little wrong, so it didn’t work.

I was in the bathroom and started panicking when the pump did not start. I asked the flight attendants for help. There was no A/C outlet on the plane. Finally, one of the attendants figured out that two of the eight batteries weren’t lying flat against the connectors. That was a panicky 20 minutes! I’m grateful to her.

Meanwhile, that whole incident sparked a little international panic on the plane. Read about it at http://starbulletin.com/2008/04/20/news/heckathorn.html

I ended up laughing about this with former First Lady Vicki Cayetano. She was on the plane, too, and taught me how to manually express breast milk. I guess I could have figured this out on my own, because what I’m about to share isn’t rocket science. But at the time, I was kind of upset, so it was comforting to just hear it said aloud.

Mrs. Cayetano said when she was nursing her children, her own mother taught her how to manually express milk. You warm the breast up with a hot compress for a few minutes, and massage the area to soften the ducts, working your way outward. Then squeeze. I’ve since found a website that’s a little more explicit, but that’s the basic idea.  http://www.breastfeeding.com/helpme/helpme_images_expression.html

I gave it a whirl just to see what I was in for if I really needed to do this. It takes forever, but I guess in a pinch, you do what you have to. At least now I know how.

Anyway, my time for breast-feeding is done – at least for this kid. Olivia got less and less interested as she approached her first birthday, and shortly thereafter, we stopped. To my surprise, it was me who had the difficulty weaning. Despite the inconveniences, I still loved the closeness it gave us. It was such a sweet and short time, but one that I’ll always treasure.