"14 things I’m going to do once I retire from breastfeeding."

By: Elly Lonon for BugginWord.

It’s time to hang up the jerseys, engrave the gold watches, book the country club, and order the sheet cake. After five years of pregnancy and nursing, I’m ready to retire these fun bags and return to a life free from milk-stained shirts. (Or, at least, the milk stains that originate from inside the shirt. I’ll admit my kids are still a bit behind on their fine motor skills.)

I’m so very ready to regain sole custody of these Gerber gozangas. The days of tiny Patrick Stewarts draining my body of nutrients are numbered, and I’m already daydreaming about the magical things my mammaries and I will do after liberation from a life of lactation.

Did you know you can contract a yeast infection in your nipples? Yup. Seven times, apparently. Coincidentally, that’s the same number of times I was treated for mastitis over the course of my breastfeeding career.

To commemorate each infection, I’ve compiled a list of fourteen things the girls and I will do after retirement:

1. Use a skipping rope. Ride a pogo stick. Hell, I may even do the occasional star jump.

2. Buy an underwire bra that pushes my jumper meat so high my left nipple could plant a flag on Everest.

3. Use the remaining Lanolin in the fourteen half-empty tubes floating around my house to cover the rusty holes in my used cars’s paint job.

4. Stop using hardened, discarded nursing pads as coasters for dripping take-out coffee cups and glasses of red wine. While I’m at it, maybe stop using the still-soft ones to twist off beer caps.

5. Take a sledge hammer to my breast pump a la the fax machine scene in Office Space.

6. Wait patiently for my Hulk-sized nipples to return to their previous Bruce Banner daintiness.

7. Resume breaking into the dance from “Single Ladies” (or whatever song has replaced that anthem in the five years since I started procreating) with abandon and no regard for the optical welfare of those around me.

8. Sleep on my stomach. Or maybe my side. Or at all. I’d totally settle for at all.

9. Resume having the other kind of wet spot in my bed. And no, I don’t mean the one my three-year-old occasionally leaves after climbing into bed with us at four in the morning.

What mums do after their kids go to bed. Post continues after the video...

10. Tear my nipple-cream-stained nursing camisoles into thin strips, stuff them into glass bottles filled with the tequila my metabolism can no longer process, set them on fire, then hurl them at an effigy of Gisele Bundchen and her hideous post baby body.

11. Consume a vat of some food composed solely of Red #40, high fructose corn syrup, MSG, and Oxy.

12. Choose my clothing based on the weather, my mood, or maybe even appropriateness for the day’s agenda rather than the easy accessibility of my milkshake.

13. Create a goodbye montage of my boobs’ best performances like they do for those defeated contestants on So You Think You Can Dance and American Idol. Like the time Lefty tried to shoot boob juice directly into my eye after we read online that it might cure Pink Eye.

14. Probably have to buy some tampons, won’t I?

Well, sh*t. Maybe I should rethink this retirement thing…

Copyright 2015 Elly Lonon as first published on Sammiches and Psych Meds.

What would you add to the list?