Before baby boy was born in January 2019, I spent a lot of time obsessively researching baby monitors, just like I do for any other piece of technology in my life. Or anything, really, because I love reading reviews. I discovered that baby monitors generally suck, and were more or less stuck in the dark ages of tech, with poor connectivity, poor screen resolution, basic or lacking functionality.  There were only a few out there that were more advanced, more on the level of, say, our smartphones, and that included the Nanit. I got the Plus version, which was newish out at that time. I’ve had some ups and downs with it which I’d like to share with you.

UPDATE: Please see my important safety update here and why I have given up on my Nanit and do not recommend it anymore.

Ah, the challenges of breastfeeding. I had been told by everyone that breastfeeding was hard, but like anything else, didn’t really KNOW until I got there. Those early days with baby boy were rough. I had tiny nipples, he had a tiny mouth, we were both inexperienced, and we just couldn’t figure out the latch reliably. I literally pinched my boobs black and blue in the first week postpartum trying to squeeze them into the requisite shape to stuff into my baby’s mouth. After that, I worked with an awesome lactation consultant who helped me figure out how to pinch them more effectively (haha), and baby and I could get an efficient latch and feed some of the time. Then, I discovered nipple shields. 

When I was pregnant, one of the best pieces of advice I got was from another experienced mama, who asked me “Do you have your pump yet?” Silly me, I thought I wouldn’t need my pump until I went back to work 3 months after the baby was born. I’d have plenty of time to figure it out, right? And she told me, “Just get it now. Trust me.”   

As a first time mama, one of the major stressors was figuring out breastfeeding, figuring out pumping, and going back to work while pumping. Pumping = hours of effort = not too much fun. It took many several months of trial, error, and experimentation to get my pumping setup optimized for me. I could have gone with everything that was out of the box but I kept tweaking and optimizing until everything was streamlined as much as possible! So now here’s my list of useful things to make pumping suck maybe a little less.