• Meet Me
    • Why If By Yes?
  • Meet Perfect Husband
  • Meet The Babbies

If By Yes

~ the musings of a left wing left hander with two left feet

If By Yes

Tag Archives: milk

Breastfeeding in Canada Posts On WMB

18 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by IfByYes in My Blag is on the Interwebs

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

babies, breastfeeding, doctors, milk, nurses, support

Did you guys see my series on breastfeeding in World Moms Blog?

I’d love to know what you think and whether it resonates with your experiences.

Breast Of Luck Part I

Breast of Luck Part 2

Breast of Luck Part 3

The tl;dr of it is that I think that the reason so many women in Canada still don’t breastfeed despite astounding pressure to do so is that while we are constantly told TO breastfeed, we aren’t told HOW.

In fact, many women I speak to have been given incorrect advice by their nurses or doctors which actually sabotaged their attempt to breastfeed.

I have met several women trying to breastfeed who have turned to a bottle in the meantime, never having been warned by their doctor that a nipple could make the latch worse. One friend was told that she had poor supply and was given galactogogues, but no one explained to her that breastfeeding is a supply and demand system, so she went out and got a crate of formula. I have met women who thought it was supposed to be easy and natural, and no one warned them that it often isn’t.

If they want us to breastfeed, where is the support?

The friend who was given galactoguges never did reach full supply, but she continues to try to at least partially nurse her baby. Last night I saw her offer him the breast only for him to refuse it in lieu of the easier-to-drink bottle in her hand. I know how desperately she had wanted to breastfeed, and I felt so bad for her. No one talked to her about supplemental nursing systems. No one told her that some people just can’t produce much milk in a breast pump – that doesn’t mean that the milk isn’t in there.

No one helped her. They practically handed her a bottle at every pass. She laments the cost of formula, the fact that she couldn’t feed her baby “naturally” and remains grateful that she can nurse him at all, even occasionally.

We get lots of guilt but where is the help?

I was so frigging lucky.

Ow, Ow, Fuckety Ow. TMI and I don’t care.

15 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone...

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

biting, breastfeeding, milk, nipple pain, parenting, teething

So, Babby’s teething. AGAIN. 

Sure, his top two incisors just came in, but apparently his second two sets of incisors decided that they needed to follow the others, because they are apparently lemmings.

So I had about three or four days free of biting Babby, and now he’s BITING ME AGAIN.

It is difficult to explain to others, men especially, how frigging painful this is.

Let’s just say that biting my tongue hard on the same spot again and again would be about as painful… if I had sharpened my teeth.

Let’s just say I would rather be stung by a bee.

Let’s just say that my nipples and the area below them are bright red, and covered in flaky, peeling skin, like a terrible sunburn, and feel about as bad.

Let’s just say that the underside of my nipples are covered in greenish and reddish scabs in crescent-shaped lines.

Let’s just say that all of my white bras are covered in dark red splotches, and when I try to pump, bright red drops appear in the funnel.

Let’s just say that I have given birth to an angry piranha, and the big eyes and cherubic grin is just a clever mask.

Of course, every time he bites me I cry out involuntarily and remove him from the breast unceremoniously. If I am sitting in the chair, he gets dumped on the floor with “DON’T! BITE! MOMMY!”

(What is it with creatures wanting to bite my boobas? This has been a problem since long before Babby was concieved).

If I’m trying to nurse him to sleep, he ends up wailing disconsolately on the bed while I hunch over next to him, clutching my nipple and studiously ignoring him for a short while. Then I hold him while he screams. What used to be a short interlude between nursing attempts is becoming more and more protracted, while he writhes and signs “Milk!” at me angrily.

Babby went to sleep last night with a big dose of Advil and very little chomping. When he woke up, I went to nurse him back down and he bit me so hard that I not only cried out, but I burst into tears. PH came rushing in and took the baby while I sobbed helplessly in the gliding rocker for several minutes, clutching my poor right booba and wailing.

I’ve never been good at pain tolerance. 

PH then proceeded to rock Babby to sleep without booba while Babby screamed and screamed in what felt like unending rage.

This is what we had intended to do over Easter, but PH was so stressed out by the screaming that we ended up backing out of the plan entirely. He hates listening to his baby cry, and it frustrates him so much that he can’t provide the comfort that Babby craves.

It took an hour.

…and a half.

An hour and a half of tea-kettle screams and vitriolic ah-hah-hah haaaaaaaas. It felt like a long time to me, and I’m sure it felt twice as long to poor PH.

Once he went down, he stayed asleep for about twenty minutes before he woke up and began to wail again. So I went in this time and offered him my other nipple, and he dozed off after about ten minutes of furious nursing. When I set him down, he woke right up again. I picked him up and rocked him to sleep on my shoulder, which only took about forty minutes or so before I was able to successfully put him down and collapse into bed.

All of this started at 10 pm. It was one in the morning when I went to sleep. I don’t know how long Babby slept for, but the next time he woke up I brought him in bed with me to nurse for the rest of the night, and he behaved well.

If any of you have suggestions, I’m happy to hear them, although I’ve trawled KellyMom and similar sites for help as well.

A couple of friends have suggested that I should just wean him if he’s going to make me bleed all over the place and sob with pain. But I love breastfeeding. It doesn’t normally hurt  – it is actually quite satisfying and relaxing, generally speaking. Giving up breastfeeding entirely would be like giving up bubble baths forever, just because my hot water heater is on the fritz right now.

Considering that I have every intention of nursing him until he is ready to stop himself, be that two years old or beyond, and that I would really miss the closeness of nursing, not to mention the basic awesomeness of my superpower, I am not willing to give up the fight.

He isn’t biting for attention, or even out of boredom. In that brief hiatus between incisors, the biting dropped to nil.

So this must be temporary.

In the meantime, we finally have motivation to get him to sleep without booba, and I have discovered a new superpower:

I can make strawberry milk.

 

Mammals for the win

16 Saturday Oct 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

antibacterial properties of breastmilk, antibodies, baby formula, breast feeding, breast milk, breastmilk fights cancer, clogged tear ducts, diaper rash, infant acne, milk, milking, white blood cells

Bodies are weird.

There are time when I look at my baby and I am like “how did I make this?”

To be honest, folks, I’m not a highly competent person when it comes to making things. I can’t even cut a straight line in a piece of paper. But this baby that grew in me has eyebrows, and ankles, and toenails. He has eyes. Do you know how frigging complex eyes are? He has a spleen. A spleen. I mean, not once, when I was pregnant, did I really think about the fact that my kid would need a spleen, but he must have grown one anyway.

Although really, he grew himself and just used me for resources, but still. It’s bizarre, you know?

And now I make milk, which he uses for resources to keep growing. I’m sustaining LIFE. With milk that I made myself.

MILK.

I have never drunk much milk. Dairy products gave me the trots when I was little so my mother kept me away from milk and ice cream and extra cheese pizzas for the sake of her own sanity. If you don’t grow up with it, milk tastes gross. It’s watery and kind of greasy all at the same time.

But I have milked animals. I have milked goats and cows.

And now I can milk ME.

Mooooooooooo.

So far I can still only get one or two ounces out of my boobas when I pump, but it’s getting easier (it was way easier to get half a bucket of milk out of a nanny goat, I can tell you that now, for free). Every now and then I get this really satisfying gush squirting into the bottle as I manage a baby-free let down, and I’m like “HOLY SHIT, IT’S MILK AND ITS COMING OUT OF ME.”

Even when I get frustrated because this kid has been sucking my boobas all frigging day and they’re getting sore and I desperately want to go take a leak, or even better a shower, but I can’t because he’ll scream about the boobas being taken away… I’m still like, “I am a life support system for someone and that is bizarrely awesome.”

Does it seem weird to anyone else that 50% of our population is capable of producing this trademark mammalian substance, but that we consider it far more normal to drink a cow’s version of it than to drink our own? I mean, have you seen cows? They crap diarrhea ALL over their tails and then swish their tails and leave brown wet smears all over their udders and we squeeze the products of these swollen, shit-smeared glands into buckets and then we drink it. But drinking human milk – that’s weird. I mean, would you eat ice cream made out of human milk? Probably not. But why wouldn’t we? Why does drinking milk made by and for people seem inherently grosser than drinking the glandular secretions of a bovine?

Especially since breast milk seems to be everyone’s cure-all for everything known to man:

  • “If your nipples get sore,” Dr. Omar Sharif told me, “smear some breast milk on them. The antibodies and white blood cells in it will prevent infection.”
  • “Oh, diaper rash?” said the lady at the baby-clothes store, “put some breast milk on it. It’ll clear it right up.”
  • “That’s probably a clogged tear duct,” said the public health nurse over the phone, when I told her my baby’s eye had suddenly filled with green goo and sealed itself shut, “massage it with warm water, and put some breast milk in his eye a couple times a day, just in case it is the start of an infection. Breast milk will clear an eye infection right up. Oh, and if he ever gets a cold, squirt some breast milk up his nose. And if you get any cuts, breast milk is great in those, too.”

“Put some breast milk on it” seems to be the answer to everything. I think could walk in with a big ole tumour and probably be told “put some breast milk on it.”

Seriously.

The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding tells me that breast milk is essentially another living tissue, like blood, and that, like blood, it is filled with all sorts of antibodies and millions of white blood cells, all trying to stop infection. Other books assure me that the antibacterial properties of breast milk are “well known” so I can store it for quite a while and it’ll just kill anything that tries to violate its inherent sterility. That’s some bad-ass milk I’m making.

I take absolutely no credit for this. As I’ve said, I can’t even cut a straight line. All the credit really should go to Babby. He was like “make this for me, woman,” and my body was like “sir, yessir,” totally circumventing my consciousness in order to do so.

All I had to do was trust my body to produce it. Thanks to a mother who breastfed, and a health care system that pushes breastfeeding and supplies lots of support for women who are getting started, I never doubted that I would be able to make the milk. I worried about latch (which he’s still having some occasional trouble with) and cracked nipples and mastitis and such, but I didn’t worry about the milk. But I am lucky. In general, Western culture just isn’t set up for providing us with the confidence to believe we can make something so frigging complex. I mean, sure, a baby is even more complex and I made that fine, but milk, too? That seems improbable, and why trust myself when there are formulations made by experts available?

So I can understand why so many women switch to formula, and why they are more likely to do so if they don’t have the resources that I was given. When he’s eating and screaming and eating and screaming, I don’t wonder about the quality of my milk because the doctors and nurses and all the books on breastfeeding all say “THIS IS NORMAL CLUSTER FEEDING AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR MILK QUALITY.”

But I can see how easy it would be to think “Oh, maybe I’m not doing this right,” and give him some formula and when the more difficult proteins made him take longer to digest it, I would think, “see, now he’s sleeping so he must have been starving on my inadequate milk”.

Like, Babby sometimes gets so excited about the booba that he tries to grab it and bring it to his face, but he hasn’t got the push-pull function on his arms figured out so he pushes himself away from it while opening his mouth in anticipation, and then crumples in frustration when it only gets further away.

This amuses the heck out of me.

My mother observing it, said, “You know, your cousin gave up breastfeeding because she said the baby kept pushing the breast away and then bursting into tears. She thought there was something wrong with her milk, that he didn’t like it. I wonder if he was just doing this…”

Or sometimes he will pull away from the breast because it’s full to overflowing and squirting on his face, and he pulls away before he chokes. I wonder how many women, feeling sure that they couldn’t possibly be able to make such a complicated substance successfully, interpreted this as their baby not liking their milk?

It could be easy to do, if you didn’t have confidence in your own mammalian super powers, and that makes me sad.

To be clear: I am NOT sad for these women’s babies. I think that switching to formula, if that is right for the family, is fairly minor decision. That cousin I mentioned, who switched to formula because she thought her baby didn’t like her milk? Well, her kid is a genius who wins all the science fairs and studies university level physics in his spare time. Formula didn’t hurt him at all, clearly. So this is post is not a lactivist screed and if you’re a formula-feeding mom who is feeling defencive and guilty reading this, stoppit right now. Your baby is happy and healthy on formula, which is a perfectly acceptable baby-feeding material.

This is not about formula being bad, nor is this about breast feeding as an individual choice issue.

This is just about breast milk itself being awesome, and how sad it is that so many women (some of whom I have talked to) are afraid that they might not be making good milk, when chances are their milk was every bit as awesome as everyone else’s milk (La Leche League says breast milk quality is “surprisingly consistent” and that a woman has to be severely malnourished before her breast milk quality starts to suffer).

Can you blame them for thinking it, though?

It’s just that we live in a society that insists that women need to be thin, successful career women who are also beaming madonnas with all the latest baby gadgets. No woman can be that perfect, so then every woman feels like a failure. Then we expect women to feel confident in their ability to make cancer-curing, antibacterial magic booba juice.

We live in a society where, if I said, “hey, anyone want a glass of milk, fresh from my boobas?” people would say “eeeew, no,” but if I said “would you like some bovine mammary secretions?” they’d say “sure!”

This is a society where Facebook still has breastfeeding photos banned as “obscene” but then women are made to feel guilty if they don’t do it.

That’s just messed up.

But look, ladies, whether we choose to do so or not, we can make stuff that kills infections and cures cancer.

That is awesome.

The downside to my breastfeeding seems to be that the girly hormones from my boobas is making him break out in a frighteningly extravagant bout of acne, which spreads around the sides of his head and even down onto his chest. No one likes to think that their baby is unattractive to others, so obviously this cosmetic flaw is concerning me an undue amount.

Pizza Face Babby!

So…

I’ve decided to put breast milk on it.

Syndicated on BlogHer

I was syndicated on BlogHer.com

NaNoWriMo!

Contact Me

ifbyyes AT gmail DOT com

Subscribe Using That RSS Thing

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

RSS Feed RSS - Comments

“Facebook” Me (it’s a verb now, apparently)

“Facebook” Me (it’s a verb now, apparently)

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 317 other followers

I’m a Twit!

  • I Don’t Think I Mean What You Think I Mean ifbyyes.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/i-d… 2 years ago
  • The Cliff ifbyyes.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/the… https://t.co/0Xn1FFKHrF 2 years ago
  • RT @lynchauthor: AAAAAH that's so amazing thank you! Can I cross post this to my tumblr? twitter.com/Kefka73/status… 2 years ago

This Month, On A Very Special “If By Yes”…

January 2021
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Oct    

Most Popular

  • Poor Ron: In Which Everyone Completely Underestimates Ron Weasley, Even His Creator (Part 1)
    Poor Ron: In Which Everyone Completely Underestimates Ron Weasley, Even His Creator (Part 1)
  • Blog Tag: In Which I Answer Questions And Posit My Own
    Blog Tag: In Which I Answer Questions And Posit My Own
  • Show Your Breasts For Amanda Todd, Or, In Which I Finally Deal With Amanda Todd's Death
    Show Your Breasts For Amanda Todd, Or, In Which I Finally Deal With Amanda Todd's Death
  • Rowling vs Meyer, Round 4 -  How Can I Describe Meyer's Writing?
    Rowling vs Meyer, Round 4 - How Can I Describe Meyer's Writing?
  • The Cancer Principle: Depression is Okay, Abuse Is Not
    The Cancer Principle: Depression is Okay, Abuse Is Not
  • Be It Ever So Humble
    Be It Ever So Humble
  • Why We Don't Want Our Son To Think He's Smart.
    Why We Don't Want Our Son To Think He's Smart.
  • Poor Ron, Part 2: In Which I Explain That Ron Is Perfect For Hermione
    Poor Ron, Part 2: In Which I Explain That Ron Is Perfect For Hermione
  • Round 1: In Which Stephenie Meyer Confuses Feminism With Kung Fu.
    Round 1: In Which Stephenie Meyer Confuses Feminism With Kung Fu.
  • Quality Over Quantity
    Quality Over Quantity

Look Through The Vault

By Category

  • Autism (1)
  • Belly Battles (20)
  • Damn Dogs (35)
  • Early Writings By A Child Genius (9)
  • East, West, Home is Best (42)
  • I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone… (122)
  • Life and Love (635)
    • 30 Posts To 30 (24)
    • Fritter Away (11)
    • From The Owlery (89)
    • How is Babby Formed? (227)
    • Me vs The Sad (72)
    • The House Saga (27)
  • Life's Little Moments (59)
  • My Blag is on the Interwebs (91)
    • Memes (15)
  • Perfect Husband (87)
  • Pointless Posts (73)
  • Polls (6)
  • Shhh, I'm Reading (55)
    • TwiBashing (21)
  • Uncategorized (2)
  • Vids and Vlogs (22)
  • We Are Family (30)
  • Well (1)
  • Well, That's Just Stupid (83)
    • Oh The Inanity (15)

Blogroll

  • A Little Pregnant
  • Also Known As The Wife
  • Are You Sure This Is A Good Idea?
  • Bub and Pie
  • Built In Birth Control
  • Clicker Training, Mother F***er!
  • Daycare Daze
  • Don't Mind The Mess
  • Dooce
  • Emotional Umbrella
  • Fail Blog
  • Held Back By My Spanx
  • Hodgepodge and Strawberries
  • Ken and Dot's Allsorts
  • Kloppenmum
  • Light Green: Life As Activism
  • Magpie Musing
  • Mommy By Day
  • Mr Chicken and the Ninja Kitties
  • Not Always Right
  • Passive Aggressive Notes
  • Postcards From Oblivion
  • Reasoning With Vampires
  • Sweet Salty Kate
  • The Angus Diaries
  • The Domesticated Nerd Girl
  • The Problem With Young People Today Is…
  • The Salted Tomato
  • The Squeee
  • The Urban Cowgirl
  • Unable to Relate
  • Wings And Boots

You Can Has Blog Button!

If By Yes If By Yes

Member of:

For Women

BlogHer.com Logo

Follow my blog with bloglovin

If By Yes - Find me on Bloggers.com

Vote For Me!

Good Blogs - Vote me to the Front Page!

The Latest Talk

Charles on TuTu Cool For School
Mamma_Simona on I Don’t Think I Mean Wha…
Traxy on Fifty Shades of Oh, Holy F***,…
IfByYes on Fifty Shades of Oh, Holy F***,…
Laura H. on What I Would Like to Say to Je…

Pages

  • Meet Me
    • Why If By Yes?
  • Meet Perfect Husband
  • Meet The Babbies

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy