I miss qualifying by one year; my oldest is 27 but...
I had my first baby when I was 21. My mother hadn't nursed because she was
bullied out of it and was very into her daughters nursing. My first meory of
nursing was when we visited my parents friends who lived on a commune. The
mother was uninhibited to say the least and I was intrigued and impressed. In
addition, my mother was an artist and I grew up seeing paintings and statues
from all eras of women nursing. To me, it made perfect sense.
When I was pregnant I read Karen Pryor and The Womanly Art. After a long
nurse I asked for my baby and wanted to nurse. the Midwife said it wasn't
necesssary but she didin't try to stop me. My boy latched right on; it was so,
well, high.
I don't remember learning how to nurse lying down; I suspect I just did it,
having seen it before.
My husband was completly into nursing, nursing at night, attchment parenting
family bed without having read a thing. I don't know how he got that way!
One of the loveliest moments of my life was when we came home from the
hospital and I lay down to nurse my baby and he said: "That's the most
beautiful thing I ever saw'.
I had some soreness but it was negligable, the same with engorgement. We
tried a passifier some, I don't remember why but it soon seemed superfluous.
I was very lucky, he was an easy baby.
I went to LLL more for social reasons than anything else but I learned a lot
anyway.
I had to go back to work when he was three months old, so I needed to learn
to pump. I had a bicycle horn pump, which was useless, and an enormous
electrical pump from Yad Sara, an organization which loans out medical
equipment here in Israel. This pump worked better but I soon found that I
coud do ust fine with a fluted lip coffee cup, by hand. I thnk it helped that we
had a farm when I was a kid, and I'd milked cows and goats and figured I had
to be somwhat like them.
I know now that I was fortunate beyond belief; most women my age didn't
have it so easy.
He nursed until he was three, which meant tadem nursing, which I kept a
secret from most people as it was very weird then. Now it's only weird, sigh.
I became a breast feeding counselor with the ICEC (Hi Wendy!) when my
second baby was little (She's 26 now and has nursed two babies!) She was
harder to nurse, but we managed. I had nursing problems with some of my
other kids but knew what to do. They all nursed on the average of 2 1/2 years.
Some were fat, some were skinny, some were independant, some were very
attached (The youngest we nicknamed "velcro"!) They started solids at about
14 months. Not a single one slept through the night until they were five!
(Now they do and I don't!)
I loved this thread!
Yael Edelstein BFC
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