From functional to perky once more: a month to go...

So today is the last day I'll pump thrice at work. Next week I'll take it down to two pumpings, and I'll drop to one pump per workday the last week of July, after a week of vacation and a second week of two pumps per workday.

But you know what I'm looking forward to even more than dropping pumping out of my life for a year or few?

Wearing regular, supportive, attractive, flattering and wonderfully deceptive REGULAR BRAS again!

In the past year I can count on one hand the number of times I've worn a regular bra. No joke; stories of mastitis attributed to underwires scared the bejeezus out of me. I think I wore a regular bra once for my birthday dinner, once for a graduation party and once about a month or so ago just 'cause I felt like it. Other than that, it's been nothing but nursing bras and nursing tanks, because the little clippies and drop-down front panels are just so, so convenient, what when you're exposing your boobs five to 12 times a day.

Funny, because I was so, so anti-nursing attire before I gave birth. "What a silly waste of money" I remember thinking to myself, back when I knew it all, confident that it was just as easy to pull a regular or sports bra up or down to nurse.

Then I had a real baby, promptly ate my "I will never" words and made my first trip to Target for nursing bras and tanks.

Thank you Gilligan and O'Malley: My four bras and three tanks have served me well for 11 months, but I'm ready to be done with them and re-enter the world of perky, underwire supported boobs.

Granted, that's largely because a near-year of nursing has left my girls a bit, well, deflated. Not quite National Geographic material, but certainly not the confidence-inspiring rack I took pride in pre-baby.

But now I can really, fully appreciate the scientific wonders of wires and padding (smoke and mirrors, if you will), and I'm excited to artificially prop up the boobs and deceivingly present (or misrepresent) that with which nature has left me.

I'm vain like that. :)

I know the boobs aren't what they used to be. The hubs knows the same. But no one else needs to know, because underwire bras are AWESOME. Well, no one other than those who read this little entry.

So I splurged last week on two new bras from Vickie's, which were fantastically knocked down to $16 each at the end of the summer semi-annual sale. So that's like $80 worth of bras for $32.

So what if a handful of early-twenty-something shoppers shot me disdainful glances as I clumsily finegaled my way-too-big-for-the-over-cramped-retail-aisles stroller through the towers of bras and panties? So what if a sales associate watched desperately as Cayden unloaded all over the floor the drawer-full of bras she had just finished carefully folding and sorting. So what if the fitting room attendant reluctantly let me into the handicapped stall so that I could prop Chicken in front of the mirror and still have room to move around?

The bottom line is this: I got me some new, fantastic regular bras, and I got them on the cheap.

And if Vickie's doesn't vacuum their floors regularly like any good retail business should, then they deserve the ants I'm sure our trail of raisins and oaty-oh's will attract. :)