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Strollerderby
The “Upper Breast Side” is an unusual boutique. A haven for nursing mothers, it offers everything from nursing dresses, blouses and tank tops to a wide range of breast pumps. It’s more than a boutique, though.
According to the owner, The Upper Breast Side is a community center where women can learn about breast feeding and get support through the hard parts of nursing a baby. They can also buy a $145 rhinestone-studded nursing bra, should they happen to need one.
This is a point of contention between the small shop and the condo board that runs the building. After the boutique was fined $250 for leaving the door ajar, they filed a human rights complaint, alleging that pregnant customers and new moms couldn’t open the heavy brass contraption. So far, their claim has been backed up. The condo board responded by saying the business shouldn’t be there at all, because the residential zoning allows for doctor’s offices and community facilities, but not retail stores.
Today, my colleague John Cave Osborne discovered a British story about a woman who nursed her newborn and her six-year-old at the same time. That sounds freaky to a lot of people, but to me it just sounded familiar.
I nursed my first child until her fifth birthday. When I finally called it quits, it wasn’t because she was too old to breastfeed. It was because I got tired of being awakened to a fist fight across my chest each morning between her and her two-year-old sister over who got my left breast. That must be the one with the chocolate milk in it.
To breastfeeding advocates and some attachment parents, this kind of long-term breastfeeding is a normal part of family life. To most of my colleagues here at Babble (and I imagine most of our readers), it’s pretty weird.
Are you paying attention?
Mammals are called mammals because our newborns nurse. Humans babies, though, don’t just latch on and eat up. No. They stop and look around, sigh, and the nursing mom will stroke the baby’s cheek or jiggle him or remind him of what he’s doing and the baby will start to nurse again.
I designate this nursing baby as a “him” because that’s pretty much my son nursed — whether on my breast or when we gave him a supplemental bottle. My daughter, she was usually more focused when it came to meal time, no matter its format. Either way, by getting held close and attended to in feeding, psychologists suggest my kids were learning the basics of turn taking, a basic element of child development the foundation of conversation.
A group of Arizona moms descended on McDonald’s en masse to hold a nurse-in after an employee kicked a nursing mom out.
On August 11, Clarissa Bradford and her kids were asked to leave a Phoenix McDonald’s when Bradford began nursing her 6-month-old baby. The restaurant has apologized, and says it won’t happen again.
But about 100 women turned out for the breastfeeding demonstration all the same. The protest wasn’t targeted so much at McDonald’s as at the mixed public reaction to the story. Commenters on the Internet and talk radio suggested women should not breastfeed in public. Many thought nursing moms should feed their babies in the bathroom if they must do it at all.
As one mom said, “Would you want to eat in the bathroom? That’s disgusting.”
It is. It’s also a pretty common request to nursing moms.
Everyone’s got an opinion on when to wean kids from the breast or the bottle. Some women do right after the lactation consultant leaves their recovery room. Others wait until they go back to work. There are those who hold out until introducing solids around six months, whereas many like the nice round number of 1 year.
Getting into toddler breastfeeding territory can get dicey, depending on surrounding attitudes, but this is also where the fun really begins. Various signals to wean include a full mouth of teeth, dexterity for unbuttoning tops, talking. “When she can ask for it is when it’s time to stop,” breastfeeding moms hear (and say) over and over again.
Mother of two, Sharon Nesbit-Davis, writes about how she knew it was time to stop breastfeeding her son. Public shame had a little to do with it, but not that kind that spurs lactivism at the shopping mall. Continue reading »
By now, I think we can all agree that breastfeeding is good. It is good for mothers. It is good for babies. It is even good for your bank account.
Still, some people feel uncomfortable when moms breastfeed in public.
All but three states have laws which specifically allow women to breastfeed in any public or private location where they have a right to be.
But the American people are still weirded out by public breastfeeding. According to a Babytalk Magazine, 57 percent of Americans disapprove of public breastfeeding and 72 percent oppose a depiction of breastfeeding on TV. When that magazine famously featured a photo of a mom breastfeeding on its cover, many readers were outraged.
Just a couple of days ago, a Florida mom staged a nurse-in at a school board meeting protesting the fact that she was asked to stop nursing her 2-year-old in the lobby of her daughter’s elementary school. Continue reading »
Fox news isn’t the most reputable source of information, but a recent report on co-sleeping highlights some interesting data. In Milwaukee county, 100 percent of co-sleeping deaths have involved formula fed babies.
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