Breast is best for some

Here we go, I have another bee in my bonnet today, and I'm fit to explode if I don't share it with you guys. For any gentleman readers, you may want to skip to another entry at this point because things are about to get very female if you understand me.

So I have just been stalking reading another lovely bloggers latest entry this afternoon, and in it she happened to mention that she is struggling to supply enough breast milk to keep her 6 week old son happy. She made one of the biggest errors I have ever found you can make around breast feeding fanatics young and old, she admitted that she is supplementing his feeds with formula. Once I saw this I skipped down to the bottom of the page to check her comments section, and sure enough snuggled amongst the congratulations and well wishes of other kind readers, there was one woman who had decided to take it upon herself to lecture this poor woman about the dangers of mixing formula milk with breast milk. Now given that this blogger is up to her fifth child, I'm sure she's perfectly aware that there are supposed risks associated with mixing milks, and doesn't need anyone, no matter how kind their intentions are to point this out to her.

I had a similar problem when Miss K was a baby. I discovered when we were rushed to hospital when she was 2 weeks old that along with the myriad of health problems she had accumulated over the past fortnight, she was also very dehydrated, and there was a problem with our feeding somewhere along the line. We had had problems with feeding from the get go. Because I have been "blessed" with a very ample chest, I always ran the risk of suffocating Miss K whenever I tried to feed her, and she also had problems latching on. Then with all the stress of my mother and my daughter both trying to die on the same day and spending the subsequent three weeks in hospital my milk supply started to dry up. In a desperate attempt to try and get the most milk for her that I could I started expressing the milk straight into a bottle so I could know exactly how much she was eating every day. We quickly found out that she was getting approximately 80ml less every feed than what she should be.

So finally after three very long and frustrating weeks of solely relying on my own milk, I finally bit the bullet and asked one of the nurses to bring me some formula. Well you would think that I had just announced I was going to let Miss K go off and live by herself in the wild for a month and see how she liked it. The nurse was so unimpressed with me she bought in an army of experts to try and dissuade me from supplementing her feeds with formula milk. Luckily for me, every staff member she bought in to see me took one look at my situation and realised I wasn't happy with having to make the decision, but I was doing it to keep my daughter alive, and told me to go ahead and supplement her feeds. I was glad to have all of the medical staff off my back, but it didn't stop the guilt that I wasn't able to feed my daughter the way you're meant to.

And that's the thing. Most first time mothers will start their pregnancies knowing that they will be breastfeeding their children. Everyone tells you how difficult it is going to be, but you never believe them. This is natural, this is how we are meant to feed our children, how can it be difficult? But it is difficult. Especially when you have two inexperienced people trying to figure out how to work these bloody milk bags, and one of those people can't do much else besides poop, sleep and make sucking motions with their mouth. You've had these giant pillows sitting in front of you for twenty odd years now, you've never really put much thought into their real purpose before you fell pregnant, and all of a sudden they become these huge unwieldy leaking weapons you can't control. And so on the horrible day where you realise you can't do this all on your own, you're not the perfect earth mother you always envisioned yourself to be when you dreamed about being a mum, and you've asked for the dreaded f word (formula you filthy minded people), the last thing you need is a lecture from someone about how you are going to give your baby nipple confusion.

So the next time you see a woman feeding her baby with a bottle, before you cluck your tongues in disapproval, milk Nazis, just think, it may not have been her first choice. Plus the baby is getting food so what else matters?

They will make a doll for anything

Thanks to the wonderful world of the internet, we are exposed to so many wonderful things that in the past we were only able to see in our imagination. Ever since we got our first modem when I was a teenager, I have been able to visit countries on the other side of the world, learn about significant moments in history and try exciting new projects that I had never thought possible. But for every good thing you see on the internet, there are at least 20 things that will make you shake your head in confusion or disgust. And I'm not even talking about adult entertainment.

Quite recently I have become interested in researching children's toys on the internet for several reasons. One I hate driving anywhere and Miss K is a pain in the neck to take up the street, and two the internet has a wider variety of toys available than my local K Mart. Even though Miss K really is too young for a lot of the toys around at the moment, it's fun to see what kind of things I can buy for her when she's older and I've won the lottery (it could happen, let me dream). But for every toy that I look at and say "yes she MUST have that" there are so many that are so inappropriate you have to wonder what the toy makers are smoking when they come up with these ideas. The one toy that makes me want to headdesk every time I see a new version is the pregnancy and labour dolls.

While being pregnant and giving birth are two of the most natural things that a woman can do, I question the appropriateness of turning this process into a doll for several reasons. While I can understand that there may come a time in a child's life when they become interested in the birds and the bees, especially if mum starts having more children, I think showing a child a doll that is pregnant and gives birth may provide more questions than answers for the child. However, toy makers and some parents disagree with me, and so the market is flooded with all kinds of dolls with buns in their ovens and some of them are quite graphic.

WARNING... Some of the images you are about to see are NSFW so to save having to do a lot of explaining to your boss, or your children it might be best to save reading this blog when you are alone....in a room with a lock.

Probably one of the first and the tamest pregnant dolls was Barbie's best friend Midge. I remember wanting one of these when I was a little girl but for some reason mum wouldn't buy me one. Probably a good idea she didn't otherwise I would have gone into labour with Miss K thinking they would just remove the top of my tummy and pop the baby out before safely clipping my stomach back into place. Thank goodness we don't spread this lie to the children of today...

That's right ladies and gentlemen, apparently children need to know the absolute ins and outs of labour and delivery these days. This lovely doll is called the VBAC doll (available at www.mamamordolls.com) and teaches children about how mummy can have a safe vaginal birth even though she gave birth to her last child through a caesarian. The baby even comes with it's own umbilical cord and placenta still attached, and there is a strip of Velcro across the stomach to show them where the baby ISN'T going to come out because they are delivered without surgery.  Way to confuse the situation. There is a similar baby available at the same website that just focuses on natural child birth and doesn't go into caesareans or VBAC or anything like that. The real difference with the natural birth doll is the press studs sewn into place where the nipples should be. This enables you to attach the baby to it's mother's breast so she can feed it. Great now babies are going to think that underneath our tops are press studs that we used to clip on to our babies so they could eat. Do children even need to bring breast feeding into their play time??

Apparently they do. Because it's not enough that their own mothers had to stop everything they were doing the minute the baby cried because they were all of a sudden doing a very realistic impersonation of a fountain, we now have to inflict this annoyance on our children. What you are looking at is the Breast Milk Baby. With thanks to some high-tech sensors in the form of flowers over the nipples of a halter top, this baby can simulate breastfeeding, complete with sucking noises and a charming burp at the end.

With all of this "educating" children on the wonders of being a mummy I'm not sure if the parents complaining that this is going to cause more teenage pregnancies aren't barking up the wrong tree. I'm more concerned that there is more of a risk of a huge drop in the population as our children will be scarred for life by the clip on tummies and press stud nipples that they will develop once they become pregnant. I know I am.