bf someone else's baby

[DimpledThighs]

I don't know if this is the right place to put this but I really have to tell someone this as I NEVER tell anyone.

When my daughter was 6months old my sister had her daughter. She had real problem establishing bfing and they were going to go over to bottles on teh advice of a HV.

I went down to see her with my DD and we decided we would try to get bf establishing. I showed her exactly how I fed my daughter but I have different kinds of breasts and my sister was having trouble latching her daughter on and had been told by her HV that her daughter was unable to 'learn' how to feed and to try a bottle.

So - I fed my sister's baby. It was to help her learn how to feed and to give my sister the confidence that they coyuld do it. They were still manly giving her my sister's expressed milk and that was great but then she tried again and eventually they ended up breast feeding.

The problem is I find this very enmbarassing to admit to. I have not told anyone apart from close family and part of me feels that it was in some way wrong to do this.

Was going to name change for this but decided tht mumsnet will be gentle (please!)

Oh and I meant to say good for you, DT! For doing it and for saying it..

Haven't read all of this thread, but I think that's a fantastic thing to have done. You should be really proud of it

I think many of us (myself I suppose I mean here) have no experience of babies or BF until we first hold our own. I suppose in years gone by when families were larger and closer knit, new mums had already had lots of hands on experience with other new babies in the family and knew what to do. They also had family to advise when/if they got stuck.

It's often not like that at all now. What you did was brilliant.

Lol boco no i'm not a man! I changed my name for a 'lets everyone change our name thread' the other week and have not been arsed to change it back i'm normally just ledodgy.

That should have said a lets everybody change our name to dave thread!

I'm surprised that anyone would find this weird actually. Can;t see why helping your sister and niece could be wrong. It's also really hard to show someone else how to breast feed. I tried to show a struggling friend by feeding my son so she could see positioning etc but it didn't help at all. Certainly if we were all a bit more open about feeding fewer people would struggle to get feeding established

No, we use wierd looking plastic babies in NCT classes instead ! So much more effective if real babies were used.