Saturday, February 09, 2008

About nursing

I've always been a fairly modest person. Compared to good friends like Cara Puff, who once answered the door to meet her new roommate naked, I'm a complete prude. But somehow getting pregnant and nursing have sort of brought out a new side of me. It isn't that I'm no longer modest, but I do believe women should have the right to breast-feed in public. It shouldn't be something that we need to hide, something considered offensive. So I am committed to nursing in public. I try to be discreet, but I don't use a nursing cover and I don't go off into a separate room. I try to be respectful of older people and teenagers, but other than that I nurse in public.

I have found young children, for obvious reasons, are very interested in nursing. I am slowly collecting some funny comments to nursing from young kids. Our friends Jess and Ryan's little girl, Rachel, walked up to me while I was nursing one day and after looking carefully, said "What's he chewing on?"

I've been babysitting some cute kids for last month or so and they are also interested. Morgan, who is about 18 months old, looks and me as I nurse, and shouts imploringly, "milk? milk?" and I say "Yeah, the baby is getting milk, that's right." Finally one day her older brother Sam said, "I think she wants your milk Blayne!" Sam is pretty sweet. Whenever Makili cries, Sam says, "Maybe you should give him some milk."

One day when we were all reading books on the couch, Sam leaned his head on my chest and said "I'm going to lay me head on your nipple." Though his mom recently told me that he actually says "nibbles" which is even funnier. She also told me that Sam and his older brother Jack were nursing on each other the other day. Sadly she didn't get a picture for me.