'Extreme' breastfeeding? really?!

[midori1999]

I saw this article linked to on another site and wondered if it might include women Bf whilst sky diving or something... However, not much that is 'extreme' about it as far as I can see. Yes, it is the daily fail, yet agaib bashing BF women, or in fact, just women in general, but it has really annoyed me, especially the comments from the 'Bf counsellor'.

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2077270/Meet-EXTREME-breast-feeders-How-breast-best-mantra-obsession-women.html

yes full of fun with the 4 boys and 12mth old dd :)

umm i have fed in a graveyard and on buses and trains and once when feeding ds1 on the tube in london he pulled off (about 9mths old so very nosey) to have a look around, but did so as my milk let down and i squirted the man sat OPPOSITE me no one said anything just sort of looked away to avoid eye contact funerals, parks, lying down on a bench at banham zoo as ds2 went rhough a phase of only feeding when lying down.

Haha! My friend's son popped off in Starbucks one and she sprayed about 4 feet into the coffee of the guy at the next table .

ha ha nice, bet it tasted better with her milk added

oh ihave fed on the london eye and in santas grotto in harrods, tandem fed in shoes shops due to meltdown ds2 over having his shoes fitted and ds3 was a little baby and feeding anyway, my mil was with me and nearly died, she thinks bfeeding should be done somehwere private.

oh and when ds2 had to have a hospital app to check his umbilical hernia when he was 2 and a bit? ds3 again a baby, i had finished feeding ds3 and the consultant had already said something about him being big and my milk being enough.... when ds2 got upset as the consultant had to lay him down to look at his tummy, so to calm him down he had a feed, the consultant was and then started asking me if he ATE food as well as he needed that more than milk, i pointed out that of course he ATE food he just happened to bfeed AS WELL. he seemed to have the idea that bmilk was what htey had when small before weaning and that once weaned they would just have food, so therefore mistakenly thought that 2yr old ds2 was only having milk! lol i didnt bother telling him that actually ds2 did pretty much only have milk till 18mths as he didnt like food, we blw and he got their eventually!

Brilliant!!!

I did once have a dietician ask what formula my DS2 was on while I was breastfeeding him in front of her

'course if you'd handed him a sippy cup (or probably a bottle) of cow's milk he'd have not batted an eyelid.

i know its madness isnt it, tbf tho when heavily preg with ds3 i had to take ds2 with me to an app at the hospital, the midwife had been in and done the usual stuff, wee check etc and then went to fetch the consultant, in the meantime ds2 got fussy so i fed him, was still feeding when the consultant came in, she was an asian lady and she positively RAVED about the fact i was still feeding him despite being preg and siad how good tandem feeding would be so he woudnt feel pushed out by the new baby etc, she was really lovely :) so there are some nice ones out there! i suspect it was the norm in her culture tho, hence her enthusiasm when most drs and midwives i met were not happy with my bfeedin gduring preg and paranoid it could cause early labour or that i MUST be anaemic etc, i never was and always went over 2wks late i positively encouraged any nursing once past my due date in the hope it would help trigger labour!

the obstetrician I saw in the US was neither yay or nay, which I found nice. He just said well 'that's fine' when I replied I still am after asking how long I bf DD until and then gave me a leaflet with costs on

I bf ds2 until he was 3 but never anywhere particularly extreme - bf room in the local shops was about the most extreme it got as my life's not very exciting.

But this thread and the time of year has just reminded me of the most extreme bf I ever saw - Christmas eve shopping in waitrose with hordes of people desperate to make sure they had the last pack of cocktail sausages or cranberries or whatever they needed for the next day. Unlike normal the place was full of people, all stressed, overheated (was snowy outside so everyone was bundled up in full winter arctic gear and the store was warm) and all struggling to manoeuvre their overflowing trolleys around everyone else.

Through the middle of this sailed a lady wearing a summer dress- those with a boobtube- like top one side of which had been flicked down as baby was held there, latched on and feeding away, oblivious to all the stares of amazement. Mine included, I have to say - not particularly because she looked so incongruous and as if she'd just wandered off some hot sunny beach while everybody else had about 33 layers of thermals and ski jackets on. But also because at the same time as doing this she was nonchalantly pushing a pretty full shopping trolley, throwing stuff into it as she went round without bothering with her list, sending her dp and elder child off to get other stuff as she progressed around the store.

Not sure how she managed to find the one well behaved shopping trolley in the store that day but she seemed to be the only person unstressed by the horrors of shopping in a crowded supermarket on Christmas eve!

I do walk around with DS latched on just holding him not in unseasonable wear but struggling with his size to do it one handed. Mind you the other day I did it in the rain walking to the car with no coat etc. on.

I pushed DD2 in the double pram, laden with shopping, while bfing 6wk old DD3 down the high st and most of the way home in a mad dash to get DD1 from playschool.

That was fun

I got some weird looks doing it in a shop but I think that's because I was chasing the escaped toddler around the store at the same time . I think he was 3 weeks. Who needs a sling for feeding hey

Well I for one am secretly pleased about this article.... but only because MrMollcat's dear mother is an avid reader of the Daily Fail (especially Femail) and so will no doubt have read it in detail. If it gets raised as an example of how "extreme" the women featured are, I am looking forward to telling her that the stories in the article are tame compared to what I've been through with her grandson (and what a lot of other women I know of, here and elsewhere, have gone through to feed their babies how they want to).

Boobmeistwe I did a big Lol at Clare Buy My Book

Boobmeister sorry posting from phone

zipzap fabulous!! That's what all that lovely oxytocin does - makes the last minute shopping a breeze. I might bring that up at an antenatal class as a benefit .

I can't really BF and carry him around myself - you all must be stronger than me. I used to feed him in a sling all the time though. I lost count of the times people came over to peek into the pouch I used when he was newborn, which covered him completely, and got an eyefull . Serves them right for not bloody asking, first.

Actually I do agree with Claire BC to some degree, many mothers do feel pressure whether internally or externally to breastfeed, and if they are not able to they tend to carry around this enormous guilt that they have failed their child and that they have missed out on a magical bonding moment with their baby. I have felt this myself, and have spoken to many women who also felt the same. She had also given an example of a woman who had adopted twins who was so desparate to bf, she put herself through a lot of stress to do so, her twins were not getting the milk they needed and they were hungry and fussing at her breast. After giving formula they drank it down and seemed content. I feel that in this case it was right to give them formula as they seemed not to be getting what they needed from the mother.

I am pg with a dc due in Jan and I really hope to bf, and have done lots of research into helping it to be successful, but will use formula if absolutely needs be.

Piglet- the best thing you can do if you want to BF is to form a support network full of people that can help you and cheer you on if you need it. BF groups are good for this, they normally welcome pregnant women so you can go along before your baby arrives. Here's a list of LLL groups.

I always hate the way the Mail put a hyphen into "breast-feeding" like they're trying to emphasise the fact that it's about BREASTS, EWWWW or something.

One of their particularly Rita Skeeter-esque articles, I thought.

The mother with twins probably would have had a better chance if (sadly) she'd sought out a different BFC, one who was actually supportive of adoptive breastfeeding and knows how supply and demand works.

Thanks hohoh there is a new Surestart centre that has just opened up (few years after dd was born), and they run a bf support group which I will go to, now there is a specialist NHS bf Midwife available if people are finding it difficult, which there wasn't when dd was born, so services have improved. I have also bought a hospital grade breast pump to help with supply to so can top up with bm if needs be. Trying to prepare

The thing was with the adoptive mother, was the supply there in the first place? Because she had to help herself to lactate was her supply not going to be the same as if she was actually pregnant with the twins and was producing the prolactin herself?

Kellymom is a great resource too. It can be tricky because there are so many books about it and even though many are written by 'experts', there are some that contain some truly dodgy BF advice. The Womanly Art of BF (LLL book) is good, a lot of people recommend The Food of Love by Kate Evans too but I still haven't got around to reading it

Thanks, hohoh I will go to Amazon

Your breasts don't know whether you've produced twins or not, or even if you have whether they have both survived. That's why your boobs are leaky and quite up and down in size in the first weeks, the hormonal part of the supply and demand cycle has to work out how many babies there are, how much milk they want, etc, and then supply mostly settles down, though of course it will continue to change according to the baby's needs (identified by changes in feeding patterns) So if she was able to feed a single baby, she would have been able to feed twins. I'm afraid I don't know enough about induced lactation to say more than that and of course we don't know about the woman's situation but TBH from reading CBC's book I think she could have done a lot better for advice.

piglet it is perfectly possible to induce lactation for twins, but it's seriously, seriously hard work and doesn't work for everyone. Claire B-C's statements that some women feel terrible if BFing doesn't work for them is absolutely true, of course it is, and that's a terrible, awful thing. That is precisely why people dedicate their time, often unpaid, often in the face of abuse, to supporting mothers who want to breastfeed so that they don't need to feel like that.

C B-C on the other hand writes book within which she offers advice which actively undermines breastfeeding. She causes women to not be able to breastfeed, then tells them not to feel guilty about it. THAT is why she makes no sense.

You will find loads of support here, and as has been suggested at a local breastfeeding group. Keep the breastfeeding lines to hand as they're looked after by fully qualified breastfeeding counsellors (they may not be at a group). It's also worth seeing if you have a local LLL, ABM, BfN or NCT group nearby and whether they have a breastfeeding counsellor who you can call upon if needed.

Low supply can be caused by rare physical conditions, but is more likely to be because the baby isn't put to the breast often enough, or, when baby is feeding he's not doing so efficiently due to poor attachment (which may be easy to fix or maybe something a bit harder like tongue tie). While many, many women believe they have low supply, in fact they either don't, and they're just not expecting a baby to feed so often, or they could rectify it with a bit of help.

Because a well-latched baby is more efficient at removing milk (and therefore telling your body to make more milk) than a pump, relying on a pump to increase supply can be more work and stress than help. While it is a useful tool for some cases it's very much not the first one to turn to.

Pumps are ace for mums who need to be separated from their baby, for mums donating to milk banks, mums wanting to express for older children, and so on. But rarely are they the best first tool for supply queries :)