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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