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Celebrating 18 Months of Nursing

Joshua is now 18 months old, which also means that I’ve been breastfeeding for 18 months! I’ve decided to combine two of my favorite things—breastfeeding and math—to calculate the actual amount of time I’ve spent breastfeeding in the past year and a half. Disclaimer 1: I’m a huge nerd and this was actually really fun for me. Disclaimer 2: I had to do some rounding and estimating. Next time I have a baby I may just carry around a stopwatch so that I can get an exact accounting of time spent breastfeeding. Disclaimer 3: If you’re a new mom and are feeling kind of anxious about how much time you spend nursing your baby, you might not want to read this right now. Okay, on to the calculations!

I’m not going to show all of my work, but like a true nerd, I made a table to organize my data. I did my calculations using an average month length of 30.4 days (364 days divided by 12 months in a year).

Timeline of Joshua’s Life	Estimated nursing hours per day	Total hours spent nursing
1st month On maternity leave	18	547
2-3 months On maternity leave	15	912
4-5.5 months On maternity leave	12	912
5.5-13 months Back at work, expressed milk	10	2584
14-15 months Back at work, transitioned Josh to cow’s milk and stopped expressing	5	304
16-17 months Home on summer vacation	7	425
18 months Back at work again! Back to cow’s milk during the day	5	152

That’s a grand total of 5836 hours spent breastfeeding. In case you were wondering, there are approximately 13, 132 hours in 18 months. That means that I have spent 44% of the last 18 months breastfeeding (or pumping). That also means that Joshua has spent 44% of his first year and a half attached to me, literally. In case you’d like to see that in pie chart form (and who wouldn’t?) here you go, from both our perspectives.

The pie charts may look a little scary, until you read the key on the Motherhood chart. See that? Time spent nursing is not JUST nursing. It’s also “me” time where I get to sit down, put my feet up, relax and enjoy. It’s also time spent bonding with my child, every single time.

One last math problem: If I’ve spent 5836 hours, or 44%, of the last 18 months nursing Joshua, how many months have I spent nursing? Think about it… I’ll give you a little time…

Almost 8 months. E-I-G-H-T months. That’s almost as long as I was pregnant! It’s like sitting down and nursing for the same length of time that a pregnancy lasts! You might think I’d feel overwhelmed by actually sitting down and doing the math, but actually I’m very, very proud.

9:00am on Monday October 17

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