If I had to miss the lactnet gathering at ILCA, at least I learned
something really nifty instead.

I had asked for an ad hoc nipple shield session, to see if we couldn't put
our heads together and design a better nipple shield.  But a participant
asked, "Why do we need to redesign it?  The one we have works very well."
Then she showed us her technique.

She turns the shield's "areola" back on itself and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s the
part where the "nipple" joins the "areola" - stretches it at 4 corners.
She puts the stretched shield over the mom's nipple and only then releases
the tension and gets her fingers/thumbs out from underneath it.  At the
session we used a water balloon as a breast.  When she took her hands away,
the nipple shield's "nipple" was about 2/3 full of water balloon.  She had
actually created a nipple on the nipple-less surface of the water balloon,
and it bulged up into the shield!  Amazing!  Now all the baby has to do is
pull the mom's nipple out the rest of the way, instead of having to suck on
an initially empty nipple shield "nipple" and draw the whole real nipple
out himself.  Seems like it must greatly increase the baby's ability to get
well attached on the areola.

What happens, of course, is that the nipple shield is only reluctantly
stretchy, and returns to its original shape as soon as the forceful
stretching is released.  In returning to its original shape, it gathers
balloon (or real nipple) into the teat.

Other participants in the session agreed that they were having good luck
with shields, were not seeing significant drops in production, and were
having little difficulty getting babies off the shield once their mouths
were bigger or their skills were improved.  None advocated cutting the
shield in any way.  It sounded as if most or all were using the standard,
not premie, size.

Still, I'm dreadfully sorry to have missed the lactnet gathering...

Diane Wiessinger, Ithaca, NY, waiting for a *very* interesting JHL on shields!