Greetings! I am an adoptive mother of six children, now ages 7-19, whom I breastfed for a total of ten years. I am not a professional. I am well educated on the topic of breastfeeding in general, but have never become certified in any way. I have been devoted to helping other adoptive moms breastfeed since 1989. I am a former Lactnet subscriber, some of you may remember. I left about five years ago, planning to concentrate on finishing a book about adoptive breastfeeding. I never got to the book. In addition to a chronic illness worsening, I found myself in congestive heart failure. The stress from this illness was the last straw for my 27 year marriage, to an MD. I am currently getting back on my feet, in more ways than one. However, I have had the opportunity to continue my support to adoptive moms (and continued to learn from the experience) all along, thanks to the internet. I am currently planning to start working to obtain certification as a lactation educator, and hope to be prepared to take the IBLCE exam in the next year or two. I look forward to learning from each of you here on Lactnet, and hope that I will be able to help support those of you who are working with adoptive mothers, or other mothers who have similar issues. One special area I have experience with is the topic of teaching older babies to nurse. A decade ago, I was able to get my daughter, Julia nursing. She was a full-term baby, born with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia. When I got her, she was six months old, nine pounds, fed through a gastrostomy, and antisocial. It took five months to figure out how to get her to accept both food and comfort from my breast, but we finally made it, and Julia nursed until she was 25 months old. Since then, I have had the privilege of following many other adoptive mothers through their journeys to teach their older babies to nurse. In these cases, the emotional benefits of nurturing at the breast tend to be even more important, as many of these babies have been traumatized, by such things as drug addiction, medical procedures or parental abuse, or have spent their early lives in institutions, where the human contact and attention they recieved was limited. Experience has shown that there is no age limit after which it becomes impossible to teach a child to nurse. I personally know of cases where children as old as five years have learned to take comfort from the breasts of their adoptive mothers, although the procedure with an older child tends to be quite different than with an infant. Best Wishes, Darillyn Starr _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html