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Infant feeding

Get advice and support with infant feeding from other users here.

^^Extraordinary breastfeeding - tonight on C4 ^^

843 replies

harpsichordcarrier · 01/02/2006 17:27

new thread for RTKM

OP posts:
emkana · 03/02/2006 14:04

Unsuitable underwear?
Is that another particularly German thing?
Please explain!

Hausfrau · 03/02/2006 14:13

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

bourneville · 03/02/2006 18:12

I have a question, having talked to my friend who thought differently from me. When the granny let her granddaughter suckle on her, was it the newborn baby or the older sister? I originally thought or assumed it was the baby, but my friend thought the older (2 yr old by then i think?).
If it was the older girl, that does rather make me feel sick to my stomach. I could slightly understand the newborn baby, although as I said way back i burst into tears when I gave my mum a bottle of EBM to try with dd when she was 3-4 weeks old so do find it hard to understand! But a 2 yr old, the thought of dd (now 2.6) being given to my mum to suckle on her, even if i was still bf dd myself...

BTW, same friend is the friend i mentioned earlier who before the prog started thought extended bf was "wrong" - now she says she even felt ok about a 4 yr old, just very wrong about the 7 yr old. She also (unlike me) saw nothing very wrong with the way the twins were weaned, though she agreed demand feeding 20 times a day was excessive, but she said in that particular circumstance, it was 2 days and everything was fine, so "not too much damage to the twins surely!" So perhaps the prog will do some good when it comes to ppl like her...

btw don't know if this makes a difference - she is a nanny and not a mother yet so I think a lot less emotionally involved with children than a mother would be (therefore perhaps not feeling so much the anguish involved in the weaning scenes). Please correct me if i'm wrong, any nannies! I asked what she thought about the idea the woman should have weaned to morning & night feeds only , and she just said she was so exhausted, she understood why she went cold turkey.

ruty · 03/02/2006 18:25

well i should come clean here, my cousin is a bit of a hippie, and we used to talk about her as strange because she let her children self wean. I don't think she breastfed any of them beyond 5, but it was not until i had my own child that i realised it wasn't necessarily such a weird thing after all. So i think having children can inform your opinions.
On the far more important subject of German men underwear, i once did a job with a number of actors including a rather handsome tall German. I had a bit of a crush on him until he started taking to walking around the dressing rooms stark naked save a red lycra thong. Crush vanished in a puff of smoke. It wasn't the nakedness that put me off he had a great body, it was the horrible thong!

ruty · 03/02/2006 18:26

and the fact that he was obviously proud of his, er, appendages.

nanneh · 03/02/2006 18:33

Has this discussion now moved on from boobs to testicles What about bumbs ?

How VERY dare you all ?

nanneh · 03/02/2006 18:34

I meant bums !

Hausfrau · 03/02/2006 18:39

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Message withdrawn at poster's request.

JennyLee · 03/02/2006 19:10

Since watching the programme have remembered breastfeeding my son vividly and have been having dreams about having babies and breastfeeding them and now have 'baby' madness and want another baby, and my brests are burning and hurting I think the programme re-activated them.??

emkana · 03/02/2006 19:12

ROFL!

All the German men that I've seen in their underwear (ahem) wore quite normal stuff, so again ladies:
don't be frightened off! If you come across a handsome (or even not so handsome) German male he might a) wear boxer shorts and b) not wave his genitalia at you at every opportunity.

nanneh · 03/02/2006 19:22

emkana - are you German or have you had German boyfriend/husband ? You seem to know alot about their underwear

emkana · 03/02/2006 19:25

I am German!
Currently married to an Englishman though - whose underwear is no better or worse than the German stuff I've come across!

nanneh · 03/02/2006 19:29

Well, I reckon most men have no taste when it comes to underwear any way, no matter what nationality !

Hausfrau · 03/02/2006 19:36

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Hausfrau · 03/02/2006 19:45

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bourneville · 03/02/2006 19:52

any answers to my qu about the granny anyone?

nanneh · 03/02/2006 20:08

BV - she meant newborn suckled at granny's boobs.

She said that when DD1 had been born after things had gone wrong during birth, they had taken her away.

With newborn DD2 she had asked granny to let her suckle at her breasts in case she herself wasn't available.

nanneh · 03/02/2006 20:15

BV - don't know any nannies and what they think about cold turkey weaning, but I agree with you.

I think cold turkey with bf babies is not what I would do. I would do it gradually and only drop one feed at a time. My son loves his bed time feeds most, so that is the last one I would drop.

Not that I am planning to, he is only 19 months now and we are nowhere near wanting to wean ; )

bourneville · 03/02/2006 20:40

nanneh - thanks for clearing up the granny thing! I don't understand what the newborn was supposed to have gained from suckling at granny, surely she would need some sort of food stuff? Though if i remember rightly newborns don't need any food as such at first, am i right?

My nanny friend agrees weaning should happen gradually, she was just saying that in that woman's situation she understands why she went cold turkey. I just get the impression from her that nannies may sort of be tougher than mums, at least emotionally ifswim (i am a tough mum in terms of discipline and not letting dd have everything she wants etc, but i reckon i felt more for the twins than my friend did). I think i mean that she thinks more rationally "only took 2 days, they're fine" because she's had so many years' experience of looking after lots of kids so knows ultimately everything will be all right. A mum doesn't necessarily have that experience behind her to know that, in addition she has that emotional attachment to her children, and of course a bf'ing mum is providing her children with food & comfort, a nanny doesn't do it in quite a personal way so wouldn't know how it feels to withdraw that...

don't know what relevance all this now has to the discussion, it's turning into a digression! Perhaps my example of the prog doing a good thing for my friend is actually because she's a nanny and knows a fair bit about children; someone similarly initially repulsed by extended weaning may not change her mind as she did and just see that weaning situation as a complete nightmare enough to put them off bf altogether...

Does anyone else have any non-mum friends with opinions about the prog?

nanneh · 03/02/2006 21:51

I have a friend who has no children. She never wanted to get married either. She is 60, very well read, educated, well travelled, intelligent woman.

She hadn't seen the prog. as she has no tv, but had heard comments on the radio.

She came round today and we talked. I was surprised that she thought bf past a certain age was weird (I think she meant anything beyond 2 years) and that it was the mother who wanted to bf past a certain age not the child .

I said but its impossible to force a child to continue bf when he doesn't want to, so how can it be just for the mother's sake ?

She also thought that bm past a certain age had "no nutritinal value" which again I said wasn't true.

She has 2 younger brothers (all bf) and she said in the 50's women in the UK did bf and that it only became more of a bottle culture in the 60's and 70's.

I was quite sad actually that despite being one of the most intelligent and open-minded women I know she had some very entrenched attitudes to public bf and extended bf.

nooka · 03/02/2006 22:17

I did "cold turkey" weaning. Granted dd was three months, not 2 years old, and it was onto a bottle, but I think that in some ways the reason was the same. I just couldn't cope with breastfeeding any more, and having made the decision to stop I just wanted to get on with it. I think that the time for gentle weaning for the mum of twins had gone by a long time ago - if she had managed it before she got so exhausted then things probably wouldn't have got so bad, and she might have been able to move to the just at night/first thing in the morning that most people doing extended breastfeeding do. Watching it, I thought it didn't look much different from the cc approach. Three days is usually sufficient to break the habit (I think the night feed swere the real killer for that family). I was also surprised that the dad wasn't more involved with the change over, but maybe that's because they knew the twins wouldn't have coped with it?

bridgee · 03/02/2006 23:19

Breast shaped bottle? Following on from the extraordinary breastfeeding prog, has anyone ever used the breast shaped bottle? Are they any good for a baby who one accepted a bottle but is now refusing? I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I'm new to this discussion stuff!

emkana · 03/02/2006 23:22

Hah Hausfrau! Feel vindicated!

bourneville · 04/02/2006 07:19

Yeah, perhaps they thought it was important for the twins to know their mother was still there, hence the father not being involved in the night-time stuff. coulda taken turns though!

harpsichordcarrier · 04/02/2006 10:51

nanneh at your friend
I posted before about my GP friend who told me there was "no nutritional value" in the breastmilk for my 2.8 year old
despite the fact this is the SAME MILK I am feeding to my three month old....

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