Many nursing mothers know about fenugreek and domperidone, they make lactation cookies and have oatmeal for breakfast. Yet at times even with all of the trying in the world some women cannot and will never make enough milk for their children. It may be due to PCOS, it may be due to other hormonal issues, or due to damaged breast tissue… there are a few reasons but the end result is that breastfeeding is not possible or not enough to feed your baby.

What do you do then?

In the case of the mother above she put out a plea to the local parenting groups and found a host of mothers willing to donate milk to her child.  She put out the plea in the early part of the day and got many responses. After work her husband did the rounds with their little cooler and collected breastmilk from the donors to take to his wee one.  This went on until the mother was able to regulate her supply and get a permanent source of milk for her child. This mother will never be able to make enough milk to feed her daughter but she will never go hungry.

I felt incredibly honored to donate milk to this family and the rest of us who did felt this way as well. It is said that children who nurse from the same mother are considered brothers and sisters.  If this is so my children have a large sibling pool that will most likely continue to grow. I have cross nursed other friend’s children at their request and would do so again if ever the need arose.

There was a great article on this a while back that here is a link to it. This article interviews two mothers, Sarah and Morgan and asks them about their own nursing relationship with each other’s children. I am honored to say that I know both of these women personally and that they could not have picked a better set of women to give cross nursing a good name.  It was on Good Morning America and posted on other websites as well. When the article came out it got mixed reactions.  Many said “ewww” and were amazed at this idea. This poll on LilSugar shows an overwhelming respose of “hell no” when asked the question of cross nursing.

Have we all forgot about how popular wet nurses were? In older times (before formula) wet nurses were what people used when they could not breastfeed their child. It was not gross or inappropriate like it is considered now. Why have we changed our minds so much?

Well obviously it is no longer as necessary thanks to the availability of formula…  But is formula really the next best thing to not breastfeeding your child? Well honestly no, it isnt… formula is last in the line of what is best for a child.

1) Mother’s Breastmilk from the breast

2) Mother’s Expressed Breastmilk from a bottle

3)Donated Breastmilk from someone else

4) Formula

This is the heirarchy of infant feeding, yet for some reason we like to jump from 1 to 4 at the first sign of a problem.

People who are against cross nusing or donating breastmilk say that it is because it is not safe. Yes, it is possible to get diseases like syphilis, hepatitis, and even HIV through breastmilk but as I know my friends and have for a long time I am comfortable saying that we are free of these diseases and that I am not worried about that honestly.

If you do not have a large group of friends to call upon when your baby needs it, where do you go?

These is this great organization called MilkShare

This can help mothers get in contact with others who can fit each other’s need. If you have milk to give, go on there. If you need milk, get on there as well!

There are milk banks available as well if you feel the need to get it from a place that has the milk pasteurized and screened for your baby’s protection. There is one in Austin that I am aware of but not one in Houston, though ig you have milk in Houston you can donate it to the milkbank by dropping it off at Women’s hospital in the Med Center.

I wish that the practice of cross nusing and wet nursing was a more popular one because as we know, breastfeeding is better for children so if a child can get it… it doesnt matter if it is from its mother or not, as long as the baby gets it.

I have to admit that I just sat and stared. I wouldnt have stared if she has just popped out the boob because to me this is normal… but covering one’s self with a blanket? That is NOT normal in my book. I asked a friend of mine who says that she covers up occassionally why she did it and her answer was that she thought that church was appropriate so that she was not a distraction to those at church.

I guess my question now is, how is a mother feeding her child a distraction?

There is a huge constant debate as to whether breastfeeding in public is lewd or not… on whether it should be legal or even protected. The most common things that are said to breastfeeding mothers are “Can you please cover up” and “Can you please go to the bathroom”.

Hooter hiders, or other covers are really just sending out the message that breastfeeding should be hidden and is somehow indecent. Who can blame people for thinking that?  Even people like Barbara Walters are more than happy to say how breastfeeding makes them uncomfortable and how wierd it is.

Who can forget last year when Barbara Walters relayed a derogatory anecdote about witnessing a woman breast-feeding on an airplane? “It made me very nervous,” Walters said on the May 17, 2005 airing of the ABC talk show, “The View.” “She didn’t cover the baby with a blanket. It made us uncomfortable.” Co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who was nursing her daughter at the time, went even further adding she was “uncomfortable breast-feeding in general.”

Why are we asked to cover up or hide? Mostly it is because of the children. People do not want their children exposed to our bear luscious breasts because their eyes might explode into their brains or something. So I say that we start our own campaign to hide bottle feeding.

Bottles are a part of our culture so much that most dolls come with them.  At baby showers some of the most popular decorations are bottles and pacifiers. One of the most popular gifts for new mothers apart from diapers… are bottles. We are inundated with propaganda about bottlefeeding on a regular basis. When do you see a baby breastfeeding on tv? in a movie? in a magazine ad? It is as often as you see bottlefeeding? How about at all? I am personally offended by being surrounded by bottles. I do not want my children to grow up thinking that you are supposed to feed a baby with a bottle unless it is completely necessary. Who can I go to when I see a bottle feeding mother to complain? Of course all of this is said with tongue placed firmly in cheek, but my main point stands. Breastfeeding is just that… feeding… with a breast.  If bottle feeding does not get harassment, breastfeeding should not either.

This is why people use cover ups for nursing. Eventhough some people might say that they are for breastfeeding and that they are for families the sight of a woman nursing her child is too much for many and as a result mothers react by hiding. I think we need to make breastfeeding the norm. There was an excellent article on Mothering called “Breastfeeding in the Lang of Ghengis Kahn” that really struck a chord with me when I read it.  In this culture they would never think of having a law to protect breastfeeding because it would not even be necessary. While I am glad that we have laws to protect us… I am sad that they were needed.

This week is the date of the Breastfeeding Challenge. We will be having it at the BIRTH Fair this Saturday and I am helping with organizing it. I think that things like this are necessary until we get to a point where breastfeeding in our culture is the norm. Where mothers are not harrassed and where motheres are not being told or being made to feel like they should hide or cover up when nursing their child.

I guess many of you are asking yourselves why it is important to have a day where women show their tits to strangers in group, well… there are many reasons for it but here are a few:

Here are the laws for breastfeeding by location. There are some places where mothers are still not protected from people trying to make them stop breastfeeding in public and even in places (like Texas) where there are laws that protect us people STILL feel the need to try and get us to either cover ourselves, go into bathroom, or stop all together. It has happened to many of us, me included. It has happened to be at the airport where a very rude waitress asked to go into a bathroom and insisted even after I told her what she was doing was illegal. It happened to be at Discovery Green park (and to other mothers) so much that we were on the news for it. They have since completely been supportive of it and had better training for their staff but it did happen to many of us. The point for making a stink out of breastfeeding in public in cases like the Discovery Green one was not to get someone in trouble. It was not to fire someone. It was solely to get them to respect us and the law. Neither I or the other mom who was on the news with me got any compensation for it and we did not ask for the heads of those who wronged us on a silver platter. We have both been there since, it is actually a favorite place of my family’s to go. I love the park and what it does for the green Houston community.  I was there for World Yoga Day with my family and kids two weeks ago and they always have events that we love to go to.

boobs

Why is our society such that breastfeeding in public is a taboo? Why do we get sneers and comments? This must end and this is the goal of the Breastfeeding Challenge.  Breastfeeding is simply feeding a child,  why don’t bottle feeding mothers get told to cover themselves or go hide in a restroom?

Breastfeeding must be seen as normal again and to get it that way there needs to be exposure to more breastfeeding mothers. We need to get out of hiding from behind out hooter hiders and from outside of the bathrooms that we have been pushed into. We need to be proud of what we are doing and not be afraid of doing what we need to do for our children.

So take them out, twirl them around, be proud! Your boobs are powerful!

I told him about my own two encounters with breastfeeding problems in public and he asked me outright why I didnt sue. Especially the time that it happened at the airport (IAH for those that want to know). He said, “not for the money Alma, but for the change… can you imagine what they do to mothers that dont know their rights like you do?”. This is a man who has never read a LLL pamphlet, does not hang out on MDC, and who really doesnt understand what being “crunchy” means… this is just a man who knows what is best for our children and does not fathom why this is such a big deal for the rest of the world to understand.

My father actually doesnt agree with a great deal of what I do. He was cautious about my homebirth (though he was present for a good while for both of my labors), he doesnt agree with non vaxxing (as someone who went to medical school in Mexico where they loooove their vaxes) and he thinks that organic is mostly horse-hockey (though my mother buys organic and we share a co-op share every week)… this is not a man who “drank the hippie kool-aide” like some would say that many of us lactivists did… he is just an educated man who doesnt understand why something so natural and beneficial is seen so dirty… this may be one of the few things that my parents and I agree on… hey, at least it’s something.

Calvin and my dad

Next week my husband is out of town so turning off the boob tube is going to make me spend more time outside with the kids (in this beautiful weather might I add) do more games with them and do more stuff around the house.

Is there anything special going on in your state for this? Unfortunately there isnt in Texas, but I might get together with some friends and celebrate in our own way.

Tell me, what are you going to do for this week?

The more I look into living a more ecofriendly lifestyle and the more that I try to infuse my children with the respect and love for the planet, the more that I realize that it is sort of like a religion.

We have what Thoreau called a hypaethral temple of sorts. It really isnt a true temple… and it really isnt a true church… it is just a respect, nurturing, and devotion for the world we live in. We admire what our world has become and we try to preserve it. I am very open with my children about what impact we have on our earth. Saturday morning when discussing animals and their sounds we talked about how the meat that we consume comes from animals. The dairy. The eggs.  We discussed how she should thank the animals involved and understand that they are part of our circle of life. She sees me pump for Calvin so she knows that milk can come from animals so I explained that cows, goats, sheep, etc. have similar breasts and thats how we get milk from them as well. She seems intrigued and we went further. She knows that cooking changes things because she helps me cook so much so we discussed how cooking made food and how veggies and fruits didnt need to be cooked to be eaten.  She had a few minutes where she was amazed at what things come from “moo cows” and I told her that we need to revere animals because they give so much to our life.

I know that this leans to a pantheistic view of life and that it involves worshiping animals and nature.. but I dont believe that it is exclusive of other beliefs that we may have. Maybe because of my own culture, knowing that my family stems from people who lived on ranches and had to work for their food in a way that is completely unfamiliar to most of us… I really want to make sure that my children know what food really is. Revering animals and nature comes naturally to me because I truly understand that the earth makes my life possible. While I dont worship in a church, my way of life does include being thankful for the forces that permit me to live my life the way that I do.  Sometimes that force is the sun. Other times it is the rain.  Our family adores rain. Not just in a “wow it cools down the heat here in the south”… but I allow my kids to play in it. Dance in it. Taste it. My children are not afraid of the rain and the wetness. My husband takes pictures and sits in awe studying the power of what our heavens have provided us.  We are truly thankful for it and watch its effects on our vegitation.

We try to eat locally, from farmers markets or Consumer Supported Agriculure shares… I know the man who grows the animals that end up on our plate. Our veggies arrive to us with dirt still firmly attached and I have been known to shake hands with the person whose hands tilled the soil that they grew in.  Kate knows that our family attemps to search within ourselves and our surroundings for sustenance.

This weekend I made her a toy snake, she asked for a toy snake when I gave her a choice. Instead of buying new filling or using new fabric, she helped me look through old fabric scraps that I had.. she picked out the scraps that she wanted me to use and she watched me sew her snake together by hand. We took an old pillow that was probably going to be retired soon and repurposed the innards of it for our snake. I used some smaller scraps for eyes and a tongue… and her snake was finished. It is made out of some black fabric with red flowers on it. It doesnt really look representative of any snake that you and I have seen.. but she loves it and she knows that we made it together.  We didnt have to buy a new toy at the store and we didnt have to buy anything to make it.

Kate loves yoga and understands peace and quiet time for meditation. We look within ourselves for peace and relaxation… we look at what we have on hand.

My hopes is that through living our life the way that we do our children will have a roadmap that will lead them to a true love for the earth that they live in.

Part of the definition of religion is a faith, a belief system… our religion doesnt involve prayers but it does involve music and art… we dont have scared texts but we do have the history of our earth and rituals and meditation. It doesnt have to do with the supernatural… but it is all about the natural. We give thanks and our practices are governed by our ethics and convictions. We do not have things that are divine, but many things in our world are sacred.

I find it distasteful to try and label ourselves…  but I also find it distateful when people say that to have ethics and beleifs you have to have an organized religion… I obviously dont believe that to be true.  We take what works for us from different systems and incorporate it into our lives. No organization needed. I have found that our family is happiest when it is allowed to grow and change… Michael and I have come a long way from the lives we used to lead and we will continue still to be dynamic in how we manifest our “faith”  but our beliefs remain steadfast.

Our way of life, or religion if you may… can be simply described as living in a way that shows respect for ourselves, our future, and our world…. and everything that encompasses that. However simple or complicated some may find that. It is us.

We helped with 66 babies at Bay Area Birth Center in 2008!
Home births 33
Birth Center 33
Biggest Baby 10 pounds, 10 ounces
Smallest Baby 5 punds, 13 ounces
Transferred to Hospital Moms-8, Babies-1
C-Sections- 3
Premature- 1 (at 34 weeks)
Oldest Mom- 44
Youngest Mom- 20
Attempted VBAC’s- 7, Successful VBAC’s-7
Breech Births-1
Twins-0
Deaths-0
Long term morbidity-0
Miscaraiges-8 (not counted in total)

These are great numbers. Her csection rate is roughly 5% which is an acceptable percentage for her total births.  The percentages of csections that is considered ok is roughly 10% for a practitioner so this is a great number.

Another number that needs to be mentioned is VBACs (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean). She had a 100% success rate last year with VBACs and that is wonderful.  Here in Houston getting a VBAC is all but banned. All of these VBACs were homebirth, I know this because birth centers cannot have VBACs at their centers… why? Ask the government.. not me. I dont know why.

The whole risk of uterine rupture thing that they claim is sooo scary seems to not be as big of a deal as they claim it is, especially if you dont give a mom pitocin which makes the risk worse.

She even helped deliver a breech!!

If the stats for our country as whole were like this the costs of deliveries would be MUCH less, and there would be less babies in the NICU and there would be less mothers recovering from painful surgeries… leading to more breastfeeding success rates.

I am so happy that my little Calvin was one of the homebirths in this tiny statistical survey.

It is appropriate that this post is about pediatricians then I guess because that is what happens after you have a baby… you have to visit a pediatrician.  While you dont have to, most people chose to because they want to weigh the baby, make sure that it is ok, possibly get tests done and after a while vaccines.

This is part of my “Where do I go for…” in the Houston area series.

We dont really see our pediatricians unless we are sick. We did well baby visits for a while with Kate and every time we went to got the third degree about not getting the vaccines that we “needed” to get.  Our ped is actually pretty good about not pressuring and about not immediately giving kids antibiotics for no reason and we really like him… but he is still a doctor.

We use the Pediatric Medical Group.  Our doctor is James Allison.  My BFF Devin uses Dr. Injac. That whole group is very good about respecting parents in regards to their decisions on their children’s health and well being.  The group was started by a doctor who understood parents and was very much into informed consent.

Some people dont believe that a pediatrician is really necessary but that a general pracitioner are just fine. I tend to agree.  One of the doctors that are holistic and respectful of personal decisions is Nellie Grose.

Another pediatrician who is open to alternative ideas and who respects parents is Krenie Stowe.  She often gives talks on infant and toddler care and on how to deal with common illnesses without medical intervention.

These are the most common pediatricians recommended in the greater houston area, there are others and I will add more in later posts the more that I find out more about them. Like I said before, I cannot and will not recommend someone that I do not have some kind of persoanl experience with.

And as an update to my birthing choices post about hospitals, midwives, and OBs. I have to add.

Stay far far away from West Houston Medical Center. A friend of mine is there right now and it is a fight and a half. They know nothing about breastfeeding and if she wasnt an educated mother she would be well on her way to having no supply for the baby and the baby would never be with her.

It lumped unassisted births (where there is no medical practitioner present, not even a midwife) and homebirths all in the same category. They are not at all the same thing. A midwife is highly trained and many of us (me included) would never have a homebirth without a midwife. I know people that have had unassisted births and that works for them. Not for me.

I like that the media is putting homebirth in the news at least… but i hate how it is portrayed.

Why dont they ever talk about how dangerous hospitals are for most pregnancies? How the US does dismally when compared to other nations regarding infant mortality?

I really wish that people were given the real low down on their birthing choices.

Bye bye selecta

For those of you who have no idea what these new guidelines are read here.

These new guidelines basically will require testing of every single lick of everything that is for kids in the United States. this in itself isnt a problem, except for the exorbitant prices that the testing will cost and that our testing is different (not better just different) than the rest of the world’s. Making it impossible and ridiculously hard for homemade toys, moms making stuff out of their homes, and even retailers like Selecta (which makes some of the most beautiful, safe, fun, and beautifully crafted toys in the world) not able to sell within the US without a huge price increase.. if at all.

It bothers me that this will make the toys that are safe not be sold because of them not being able to get the testing done, and that the megalomarts like Walmart and such who can afford the testing will most likely continue producing their *pardon my french* crappy plastic toys only because they can afford to follow the new regulations.

I know that this is a reaction to the huge china recalls in the past couple of years but this is an awful way yo go around trying to right the wrong that were done. ugh.. they just dont get it do they?

For more information go to the website of the Handmade Toy Alliance.

They mention Kathe Kruse dolls in the article. I hope that these dolls are still sold in the US as they are some of my absolutely favorite dolls for the kids. They are just beautiful.