I had a similar experience as you did with breastfeeding. And we are not having another child, but I often wonder if we did if I would try to nurse.

 

You HAVEN'T thought about Hostess Snoballs IN YEARS? What the heck have you been thinking about? :)

Just read your last few entries...love them all!

Hallie :)

 

Wanting to nurse and finding that you are unable to nurse your child is a very emotional thing. I felt like a failure to my baby when we were unsuccessful with breastfeeding. In truth, it still kind of hurts that I missed that with my daughter.

I was luckier with #2 and my son nursed like a champ, which was great, but also highlighted what I missed with my daughter.

I hope #3 nurses as well as #2 did. If not, I guess we'll all get by anyway. You just do what you have to do, right?

 

Sometime soon, I am going to figure out how this all works for myself. I really appreciate reading your perspective.

 

This is an enlightening post,Alex. I's comforting to see a perspective of someone who has a little more distance from the period.

Thank you.

 

This causes so many of us guilt and it's sad but I have to say that I experienced some of it with my first when I was having a lot of trouble breastfeeding. I just wouldn't quit because I knew I would feel guilty....so it breaks my heart that you didn't have a choice and yet you still felt that guilt. I can understand a bit of what it must feel like. But I think your decision to avoid the whole battle IF you had a third is an excellent one. Why put yourself through that again?

I never had a drop of formula and I am pretty normal. Well okay so the jury is still out on that but you know what I mean.

Thanks again for sharing your perspective, I think it is so important for all moms.

:-)

 

I had a very similar breastfeeding experience as you did with my first daughter. My lactation consultant also told me flat out that "some women cannot breastfeed." The whole ordeal was terrible.

So, now that I'm 31 weeks pregnant with daughter #2, knowing that #2 is probably my last baby, I'm not putting myself through that again. Like you said, my job is to make sure she's fed and happy. I also need to make sure I'm happy and I don't want to miss out on so much the first month like I did last time. Thanks for this post.

 

I think it's just such an individual thing and a decision that each woman has to make for herself, and what's best for her and her baby. I think it's terrible when some breast feeding moms make formula feeding moms feel like they've let their children down in some way. It isn't right for everyone, that's all. I was really fortunate, I had plenty of milk and it wasn't difficult for me or painful in any way. My best friend had HUGE difficulties and had to bite on a cloth diaper every time she nursed because it hurt so much, and finally went to the bottle. You just never know until you're in that position. Great post!

Lizzy

 

Excellent post, as usual. I hope that other new moms see this and feel like they are not alone. The guilt is not worth it. Breast is best unless it is causing your baby to starve to death. Formula is way preferable to starvation in my opinion. No need for anyone to feel guilty about that! :)

 

Why do we feel so alone in the beginning? What a great piece.

Sorry to be gone so long. It's been one of those months...

 

I was outraged when I read the article about the CA decision. First of all, HS parents are accountable. They have to report yearly on the progress of students. There are state requirements that must be met. I'm not exactly sure why the supposition is that forcing parents to get teaching certs will guarantee a better education. Many, many many HSed children far surpass the level of education of their public school classmates.

yes, if I were in CA I'd be picketing. If this becomes an issue in FL, you know I will be.

btw, I tried to email you earlier with a response to a question you asked, but for some reason it got bounced back. Shoot me an email and I'll reply to it. :)

 

Amen to that!

 

CA has tons of crazy education laws for both the regular-schooled, homeschooled, etc.

The teaching certificate thing is laughable. They already have way too many restrictions in CA.

What I'm most worried about is its setting a precedent for laws in other states. I'm guessing that one may go all the way to the Supreme Court. It will be a big battle.

 

Not to mention that if CA requires teaching certification, the very notion of homeschooling as being a different kind of education from the mainstream gets entirely subverted.

 

I definitely don't agree that you need a teacher's certification to be a great teacher. I think your stance actually jives well with your liberalness because it's basically just down to individual civil rights - and that's what liberals care about.

I read about the decision in California, and I don't agree with it. I don't think a teacher's license is the answer. On one hand, I like the idea of being able to raise my kids however I want with no government interference. On the other hand, as a former teacher, I've seen home-schooling go wrong on so many, many levels. I don't think it's wrong to want some kind of system that doesn't let these kids fall through the cracks. I'm just not sure what the answer is.

And I would never, ever, ever home school in a million years. Never. Ever.

 

I'm going to go out a limb here, in which many of the fine readers of this blog may want to beat me with, and say that I have no problem with expecting home-schooling parents to demonstrate that they have teaching qualifications. As a society, we have a vested interest to make sure that all kids have access to a quality basic education. I don't care if it comes from public school, private school, parochial school, or home school, there are effective methods of learning that teachers should understand. If we expect teachers in non-home schools to meet certain standards, than it short changes home-schooled kids to exempt their teachers from those standards.

A teaching certified parent may still determine what the child's curriculum is - something I also don't entirely agree with, as it may mean that kids get no exposure to ideas that the parent does not agree with, but that's another story and I don't think most local schools should set their curricula, either because then you wind up with crazy regional selectiveness, like kids in the south not learning about the civil war... now I've really digressed, sorry.

The point is, we expect teachers to meet minimum requirements that enable learning. A parent's love and best wishes for a child are an excellent start, but not always an effective way to prepare a child for success in this complicated world in which we live.

 

Thanks Alex---I agree with so many of your points. Let us parents decide what is best for our kids---the VAST majority of us has weighed all the options and come up with the ones the best fit our family and situation.

 

Suzanne,
Thanks for your comment. I'm all for accountability. The CA law does not address this, though. Different states have different ways of measuring this. Some require students to take tests. Others require the parents to meet with the superintendents to go over lesson plans. I'm sure there's others out there too. To me that seems like a way to check and make sure education requirements are being met or at the very least being thought about.

 

The home schooling thing is very hard for me, since I come from a family with so many teachers. It just strikes me as absurd that we acknowledge that teaching is a profession but then say that really, anyone can just do it. To me, it denigrates all the important skills that teachers should master before they are set loose on kids. At the same time, I acknowledge that there are enormous quantities of extremely shitty certified teachers out there, and I'd like to see something done about that. My husband read somewhere that most new teachers come from the bottom 25% of their graduating class, which is really depressing. I guess my main interest is in finding the right balance to ensure that kids get a quality basic education.

Thanks for providing a format for having such an important discussion!

 

Hmm, I was about to softly disagree with you and then I read someone else's comment clarifying the HS parents are actual subject to annual state requirements. It is a complicated issue for me. On one hand, I think families should be given large amounts of freedom with how to raise their kids, but I also think that parents individual rights cannot be allowed to infringe on their children's right to the same basic education that all other children have access to. Not that public schooling is perfect. Far from it. But I don't discount the knowledge and skills that certified teachers acquire in their study and experience. (I say this as a university teacher, who would feel sorely underprepared to teach elementary education.) I guess, I am not necessarily immediately opposed to having HS parents subject to some regulations...although requiring teaching certification sounds a bit extreme, and, as you already stated in the comments section, doesn't actually address the issue of accountability.

 

Excellent points, Suzanne and Chantelle. That is true. Our teachers work incredibly hard and have to take numerous classes to be qualified. They also need to learn about different learning styles and flags for learning disabilities, not to mention the information that they are teaching. Again, I am also have no plans to homeschool. To me school was a great experience and one that I want my kids to have not to mention it seems like a tremendous of work, but I could be wrong. To me though it's about individual freedom. I think as long as there's accountability, the education is generally speaking still protected. As was pointed out, even in public schools you can't always guarantee that the kids are learning what they are supposed to be learning. Thanks for all your comments!

 

Oh this steams me. I'm a California resident and while I don't plan on homeschooling, I don't like that I no longer have the option (unless I get certified which is such hoop jumping if you ask me.)

Having certified teachers teach your kids in no way guarantees they'll get any kind of a decent education here. People are fleeing to private schools in huge droves because the schools are so bad in areas, my city in particular.

I'm not faulting the teachers of course, but for the parents who need options, taking this one off the table is poor legislature. They might try fixing the schools rather than trying to force kids back in them.

My understanding with homeschooling was that there were standardized tests that they had to take to move up, just like in regular school. If the kids are achieving, why insist on certification?

 

Thank you for being an open minded non-home schooler. As a HSing mom, I am the first to admit that I am not qualified to teach in a large class. The dynamics of the public/private classroom are very different from the dynamics of my 4 student classroom. I can see the areas where they thrive and where they need to improve because I can afford to take the time to see it. I am not held to a bell ring if a math lesson needs some extra time to make sure they understand it today and not wait for the next scheduled class time.

Also, I make sure my kids take the standardized testing (we have more options than that here) because I want to hold myself accountable to their education.

Ultimately, you can have good or bad teachers whether at home or in a school setting, and unfortunately it is the bad that make better news stories.

 

Very thoughtful post on a difficult topic, as usual. When I read it, all I could think about was the protests that La Leche League are probably organizing outside Ephron's home at this very instant. Some people hate debate or intellectual curiosity. Usually those people are conservative Republicans or crazy religious fanatics, but not always. :)

 

Have I told you lately how much I appreciate you and your blog? No? Well, I do. You are calm, thoughtful, helpful, comforting and encouraging. If Nora Ephron isn't reading your blog already,I am sure would appreciate and support your words.

 

This is funny. I have a friend who pretty much exclusively breastfed her first born. She's not a zealot by any means, but she made it the whole year. Her second child is six months old and still being breastfed, but is getting three bottles of formula a day. We live pretty far apart, but when we visited over New Years I teased her about the "baby poison" she was giving her daughter (she knew how much grief I'd been given about not being able to breastfeed, so she was in on the joke.)

But her situation does go to show that even in the same family, it doesn't always work out the same for every child.

 

What an interesting and thought provoking post.

I'd think, however, that Ephron is taking her thoughts a little beyond the realm of logic. Why on earth would the natural way to feed a child make him or her allergic to foods. Interesting speculation and yes, it does seem that there are a lot of highly allergic kids out there, but to blame nature? I think not.

 

Hmmm. I would have to say that the significant rise in childhood allergies(and other diseases/afflictions) is probably related more to other factors than to the moderate rise in breastfeeding in the US. It's not like b.f. is a new thing that just started in these past 15 years. I'd make a wildly uneducated guess that the culprit would be more in the line of antibiotics, antibacterial soaps/etc., and a world that may be trying to heal itself by trying to get rid of some of its inhabitants (morbid thought, I know. Just a wild, esoteric idea of mine.)

 

Thank you all for your comments. I don't believe that Ms. Ephron argued that anyone is actually allergic to breastmilk. (I certainly don't believe in any breastmilk allergy.) My guess, with the key word being "guess", is that what she is talking about is the argument that increased allergies are caused by our increasingly toxic environment and our increased consumption of processed foods over past generations. With processed foods, there can be a risk of cross-contamination (bread being exposed to nuts for example) so that when a mom consumes, for example a piece of bread, she is also eating traces of nuts at the same time which can then be passed on to her baby. Again, not a reason not to breastfeed. Just food for thought so to speak.

 

When I breastfed Alex many years ago, we were told that whatever went through our bodies went into our baby. Therefore, we were told to avoid caffeine and certain allergen producing products. Are Moms still being told this today? It seems logical to me that if a mom ate a lot of peanut butter, that her infant just might be exposed to something inside the peanuts that could trigger an allergy later. I don't think Nora Ephron was questioning breast feeding. She was just wondering why so many more children have allergies. I have often wondered the same thing. Rather than shoot the messenger, wouldn't it be better to see what is passing through the breast milk?

 

Hi Anonymous,
I absolutely agree. Thanks for commenting.

 

People have always looked at me funny when I've said I can't eat tree nuts when I'm pregnant or breastfeeding. It's really hard when you're craving nuts too.

I've always wondered why people care so much how I'm feeding my baby. I don't really care how anyone else chooses to feed their children. If I ask if a mom is nursing it is only because I'm making them supper and want to make sure to make something non-spicy, etc.

I remember feeling like I needed to clarify that is was breastmilk in the bottles I was giving my daughter. I was crushed that she wouldn't nurse. So much so that I pumped my milk for 6 months before I finally gave up.

Thankfully my second child nursed easily and for more than a year.

We'll see what #3 wants to do.

 

I love this! As Erin said, I love that you can be so coherent and calm on such a hot button topic.

 

I wasn't able to breastfeed my son, either, and it was heartbreaking to me at the time. He's grown up strong and healthy, though, and he doesn't have any of the allergies his dad does or that I do.

I'm not saying this to support Ephron. I do feel that she was being tongue in cheek and was really commenting on all the "special stuff" we do these days as parents, along with the fact that we all survived our less coddled childhoods. For example, my mother was encouraged, by her obstetrician to have a martini a day so that she'd have a relaxed, calm pregnancy. He also didn't think that the fact that she smoked was an issue. Does she wish she hadn't done either of those things? Of course! But I didn't have foetal alcohol syndrome and so far haven't developed lung cancer (knock on wood).

I really enjoyed your post. While breast is best, aren't we lucky to have some alternatives that our ancestors didn't. Without a wet nurse, your sons and mine wouldn't have survived. Horrible thought, isn't it?

 

Another insightful and interesting post on these issues. I am interested in the study. I hadn't heard anything about it.

 

When I read the title on Blogher (yay Blogher) I hopped on over to talk about MY allergies and breastfeeding.

My baby had allergies (not food allergies, pollen allergies) from the minute he was born, by the way, and I did breastfeed. He inherited them from me. I never had them as a child, but I have them as an adult.

My doctor told me to take benadryl for them when I was pregnant because it's safe for the baby in utero.

But, he did NOT tell me that benadryl would DRY UP my breast milk. So for 3 months I struggled to keep breastfeeding a starving baby.

First the milk wouldn't come in though I tried everything including beer (advice in a 1970s Le Leche League manual).

I would sit with the pump on my breasts for the majority of the day trying to revive my milk.

When the OB/GYN's nurse told me to stop the benadryl I started taking Zertek for allergies and it didn't help. It was spring and I HAD to take something. All the fenigreek in the world wouldn't make my milk come back.

By 4 months I gave up. The baby has allergies - but he had them when I was breastfeeding. He had them genetically from birth.

But, I'm still furious at that doctor for robbing me of my year of breast feeding and causing so much stress at the beginning by telling me to keep taking the benedryl.

 

J and I were just talking about the allergy issue, and he said that it's also due in large to the fact that parents are so paranoid about their kids' environments and they never get exposed to anything...in the good ole days before formula, they didn't have these extreme allergies either, but mom's didn't restrict their diet for breastfeeding then either. It's a tough call, but I'm glad that people are addressing the fact that there are, dare I say positives?! to formula. Good blog!

 

{I'm trying to type this while my daughter is removing my socks.}

I have such mixed feelings about lactation consultants. They rarely seem like reasonable people and only add to the stress and feelings of inadequacy.

But you are truly one of the kindest friends out there.

 

Thanks, SMID! You're right about the lactation consultants. The one I had was great and was the person who told me not to breastfeed and that my kids would be fine. However, I've heard from others that not everyone has such a positive experience.

 

Yes, playdating is so hard! The ones we've had so far (that would be two) I've taken the kid home from school in my car and the parent picks up later. These kids are 5. I think 4-5 is when drop-off playdates start --maybe? Ugh, who knows!

 

The lactation consultant I had with my daughter was great. My daughter still didn't breastfeed, but the lady was nice. (Didn't need the consultant with #2.)

As for playdates, we usually drop off and pick up our own kid if we are not staying and having a mommy playdate too. We figure it's the least we can do if we're getting some kid-free time.

 

How odd for the NP to feel devastated by the actions of other people. I think she needs a hobby or something.

I'm glad to read that you are happy with your decision and had good results.

 

I was 5'0" tall with size E boobs when I got my reduction. My parents were totally on board. I was 18 and did not want to go through college the same way I went through high school and middle school. The physical discomfort is one thing, but the emotional is quite another. Had I known what sexual harassment was when I was on the receiving end of it, I probably could have made a bundle.

Either way, I knew when I got it that breastfeeding would not be possible (and my scars are quite visible and probably always will be). At the age of 27 when my first child was born, I might have experienced a bit of wistfulness about not being able to breastfeed, but that was it.

I've NEVER regretted it. The last 13 years of my life would have been miserable. My kids are happy. THey are healthy.

It was the right decision for me.

 

Yeah that nurse chose the wrong words...

I would have done the same thing had I been faced with the need. Nothing that you describe sounds bearable just to have the chance to breastfeed your baby years later.... bloody shoulders - NO WAY!

I personally have not had a drop of breastmilk in my sys