ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

As more and more research comes out showing that the benefits of breast-feeding are modest at best, I’m starting to come around to the French feminist theorist Elisabeth Badinter’s views, which I once thought were overly radical and sort of bananas. I’m all for women breast-feeding if that is what is right for their families, but as Badinter does, I am finding the cultural push for all women to breast-feed, no matter how difficult it is, to be more and more oppressive.

in france it's conventional wisdom that breastfeeding is an outdated relic of a more sexist age, which is ironic given how outdated and sexist they are about pretty much everything

the French probably just want breasts kept as sexual toys

CAN YOU BLAME THEM

http://aubignynewbuzz.hautetfort.com/media/00/00/3718310004.jpg

Liberté, Egalité, Seins

This study is looking at outcomes ages 4-14, which is fine, but whenever it's been discussed with us many of the arguments against bottle-feeding are about the drawbacks it has well before age 4.

More infections, higher rates of infant eczema, more gastro-intestinal problems (higher rates of vom, squits and constipation) are all things we've been told about. Very little time has been given to any "will do worse in high school" stuff.

Also, given the reactions women still report getting when they BF in public, I think it's fine for it to be moving up in "societal priority".

My parenting advice: DO WHAT YOU WANT.

Similarly, my mantra = WHATEVER WORKS.

My parenting mantra : ALWAYS KEEP THE CHILD CONFUSED

Tiger Mom eat your heart out.

Similarly, my mantra = WHATEVER WORKS.

OTM

I have always wondered how breast milk works exactly. If you eat junk food and don't take vitamins etc...is it as "healthy" as the breast milk from a woman who follows a very deliberately healthy diet? It is tailored made for baby but how?

I am still breastfeeding August and every day I wake up amazed that I still have milk. I have days of juiced veggies and much fruit eating, other days are chips, Hershey bars and toast. Vitamin taking is off and on. I hope it is doing all they claim it does. It's not easy having to stop everything to take a milk break. August does much acrobatics while feeding too leaving me feeling me as far from French as you can get.

My understanding is that the milk gets all the proper components from you, so as long as you're not malnourished or actually vitamin deficient, the milk will be fine.

It's like how in the first trimester if, say, you are wildly nauseated all the time and averse to 90% of the food in the world and can only manage to eat buttered toast and baked potatoes for days on end and call your OB frantically worried you're harming your fetus, they will reassure you that your baby is getting all it needs from you and as long as it's growing properly, all is well.

Or so I've heard.

yes, this is basically what i've come to understand as well.

The quote unquote crack baby study provides a lot of perspective on the issue. The factors that really do a number on babies and children aren't so much what their mothers ingest, but all of the social and environmental factors that come with living in poverty. If it makes someone feel better to manage their diet very carefully while pregnant or breastfeeding, that is awesome and they should do what makes them happy. But I wouldn't stress out about having days where you eat a lot of chocolate and toast.

Obv that's only one lesson to take from that study. The biggest one should be that we need to fix our fucked up country.

Don't know about other people who breastfeed, but I'm getting all the extra calories I need from Haribo right now. Might cut back if F begins to take on the appearance of a gummi bear.

I had the most insane intense unstoppable sugar cravings in my life for the first couple months of breastfeeding, especially any kind of sugar coated gummy candy like those "fruit slices" and also some Trader Joe's fruit gummy square things. It was kind of scary! The internet told me it's pretty common, though, so I just went with it. It's better now than it was but I still consider ice cream and chocolate to be staple foods.

Not gummy candy. Jelly candy. I felt it was very important to clarify.

The factors that really do a number on babies and children aren't so much what their mothers ingest, but all of the social and environmental factors that come with living in poverty.

I JUST opened this thread for the first time. My wife and I, after a miscarriage in 2005 and almost a decade of infertility stuff after that, attended the two-day seminar at the open adoption agency we're working with this past weekend. We met with birth moms one day and adoptive parents the next, telling us about their experiences.

This sort of thing was a running theme, as a huge percentage of their moms are homeless, use various drugs to varying degrees, smoke, don't eat well, and so on. The agency basically tries their best to keep them housed, fed, clothed, gives them phones to stay in touch and bus passes to make it to the doctor. The adopted kids all seem to turn out just fine, though the people at the agency were quick to point out that alcohol abuse is by far the worst (though surprisingly least common) thing that they see in terms of child development.

The part that sort of summed this up to me was the rather tightly wound, very focused and disciplined organic-everything stereotypical upper middle yuppie adoptive mom talking about meeting her birth mom for lunch the first time, who had requested massive amounts of sushi and a pack of smokes after lunch as well. Later as they were getting to the hospital she asked for grape swishers and a can of chew.

I'm just amazed that someone pregnant could even think about grape flavored cigars without barfing everywhere. Bless.

That's very exciting about the adoption agency!

Really anybody pregnant or not...

Grape flavored gum makes me want to hurl, and I'm not a fan of cigars and I need to stop thinking about this now.

Thanks. This whole thing has been super intense - we had to submit full financial information about every single dollar we have or owe to anyone and the past couple years tax returns, get fingerprinted for a full FBI background check, fill out a massive questionaire / autobiography about ourselves, our relationship, our families, and our strengths and weaknesses, get physicals and doctor approval, and have questionnaires vouching for us by four couples with kids that we've known for at least five years. Not to mention the home study and the brochure we have to put together for the birth moms to browse through.

We're now in the waiting pool and could be picked by a birth mom at any time with very little warning, hence me finally feeling ready to poke around in I Love People-Making.

My general feeling on all of these parenting movements/trends is that there are a lot of factors that go into shaping a little person, and you can't really ever pinpoint one as being make-or-break (beyond basic nutrition, sleep, love). Kids have thrived in both more and less "attachment oriented" families, in more and less disciplinarian families, etc. And they've been screwed up in all of the above as well. I think if you are focused on trying to be a good parent and do what you think is in your child's best interests, you probably will!

That whole process is bananas. Not that our path with IVF was easy, but the only gatekeeping was financial. We could be axe murdering scientologists for all the fertility clinic knew.

following a couple of people i know through the adoption process really opened my eyes and made me sort of politically evangelistic about it - the hurdles are ridiculous, and the fact that one of the "loopholes" that got closed in the tax code is the deduction for adoption costs is completely fucking maddening to me.

basically if you want a great "system is broken" talking point, economically discouraging people from adopting unwanted children in need is a pretty good flashing neon sign imo

We opted out of IVF mostly cause of the money, we weren't comfortable essentially gambling when we could go for a sure thing. Though honestly after years of random doctor visits I don't know if we could have subjected ourselves to the necessary routine for that to work even with unlimited funds.

We know a couple people who've used this agency, and the women who run it have been doing so for 30+ years and are pretty badass - they've seen some shit and have a really grounded take on the realities of what kind of women are in the position where they need to give up their child and really emphasize that to the adoptive parents.

It was actually really touching to hear a lot of the rather sheltered, upper-middle-class adoptive parents sharing their experiences and how it opened their eyes to and changed their opinions about this vast, invisible underclass that they never encountered in their daily lives and now are essentially part of their extended family. Bitching about how the nurses treated their dyed-haired / tattooed / dentally-challenged birth moms like garbage, having a new sympathy for street kids, understanding the need for a social safety net, that sort of thing.

Sorry to get all logorrhetic here but it's been a long-ass time since I've felt like I'd ever actually get to be a parent and now sometime in the next 12 months or it's probably going to happen and I'm pretty ecstatic about it.

omg I just got so excited for you I got butterflies.

being a parent is the best, even when it's horrible

haha so true

That is so awesome, Joygoat, very exciting!

I have always been interested in adoption but found, what I understood of the process, overwhelming. It is not easy. I spoke to two women who adopted in the early 70's and either they forgot a lot of what actually happened or it was just terrifically easy. I watched a Cary Grant film in my early 20's called Room for One More and it got me interested in fostering and adoption.

Carl, that article will stay with me a long time.

I spent the first year of breastfeeding being as healthy as possible, hard to do in food deserts and we were in a big one. After a year I focused more on trying to get August to more solids. Finally, she is finally there and eats what we eat. She still nurses at nap time and bedtime and all night long it seems, an hour or so upon waking.

This is maybe TMI or not very exciting but Ivy had a standard complement of preemie/NICU baby latch problems and I had some oversupply/forceful letdown/endless engorgement situations so we've been using nipple shields with great success. Some people are really anti-nipple shields, but I think they are great (beats the hell out of exclusive pumping for damn sure), although I often envied people who could just pop their baby on their boob without accoutrement and also have one less thing to wash. Plus it increases the difficulty of nursing outside of the home. Anywayyyyyyyy I've been gently trying to wean her off of them, mostly just offering the breast without them to see how that goes but not like insisting she nurse without them if she wasn't into it. I figured she'd probably grow out of them since her latch issues were more about learning eating competency (plus the relative size of her mouth and my nipples, and also not choking). We'd gotten to the point where I mostly just used them in the morning (because otherwise it is like drinking from a firehose, poor thing) and this morning she straight up refused to nurse with the shield*! I'm sure we'll backslide before we're done with them for good, but I'm pretty psyched that she's steering the ship towards shield-free nursing.

*Also sometimes I call her Vic Mackey because she's on the shield and mostly bald, and I don't really want to think about Michael Chiklis while breastfeeding, so that's another good thing about this development.

lol

whoo boy, K's sleep habits are OUT THE WINDOW. Some kind of 2-year-old regression/separation anxiety thing. We tried to referberize her a couple times but it's not working somehow, so we're doing the stay in the room until she falls asleep. But she has a cold and keeps waking up, and last night she finally just wound up in bed with us. I got kicked a lot.

Aww Carl, your post didn't get me all TMI, got me more thinking Go-Ivy, Go-Carl!!! WOOHOO Sweet!

Thanks! I'm definitely not used to talking about my boobs on the internet. Except in the bra thread.

Hurting-I keep hearing about this phase. August has never (EVER) slept for very long without me near her so...uh, wondering how this can get more complicated once she reaches that stage. Slipping out of bed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night has to be quick or she'll wake up. As an infant, getting her from arms to mattress was a feat. Slipping away while she sleeps...ninja...sometimes I still leave my shirt behind with the hopes she'll keep smelling mommy and stay asleep.

Feel the whole world has seen mine or is well aware of them online.

:o

hahaha

Oh man Ivy is such a good sleeper. Bedtime at 8 and reliably sleeps through the night in her crib, slept through upstairs neighbors' party, sleeps through us doing normal stuff in the apartment... I feel like when she hits toddlerhood there's going to be hell to pay.

Fox is the opposite: he slept a grand total of 6.5 hours yesterday. Argh. How single parents do this is beyond me.

Hurting-I keep hearing about this phase. August has never (EVER) slept for very long without me near her so...uh, wondering how this can get more complicated once she reaches that stage. Slipping out of bed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night has to be quick or she'll wake up. As an infant, getting her from arms to mattress was a feat. Slipping away while she sleeps...ninja...sometimes I still leave my shirt behind with the hopes she'll keep smelling mommy and stay asleep.

― *tera, Thursday, March 20, 2014 8:01 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I forget how old August is, and it's different to an extent for different children, but K's relatively good sleep phase probably lasted from like 9 months old to about two weeks ago. Last night I was on the floor next to her crib from 8:30-9pm, again from 9:30-10pm, then I just fell asleep on her floor from 11pm to about 1:30 am, at which point H realized where I was and came in and got me. She did sleep from then until about 8am, mercifully.

That is a long run, Hurting. August is 23 months old...in five days.

She might be more independent about getting herself back to sleep once she's in her own room?

Although that of course comes with its own issues.

She's been in her own room for over three months.

We did the ferber thing back when and it was tough but seemed to "work" I guess. Somehow right now I don't feel like it will though, she's kind of too smart to give up, but also not old enough that we can fully explain things to her.