Breastfeeding Tip| Parenting Help on Feeding baby

Breastfeeding for Your Baby’s Total Satisfaction
Everyone recommends breastfeeding. Brave mom that you are,
you’ll give this a shot. How you nurse determines your baby’s
satisfaction and your quality of life.
A big complaint is that nursing seems constant. Lucky you – this
is so easy to fix! The plan - give baby a full feeding at each meal. A
satisfied baby is ready to go about the business of being a baby.
Follow along and you’ll both be smiling.

Feed your baby right when he wakes up. Start on one side
and encourage him to empty it. You may have to jiggle and
tickle to keep him awake, or even start removing some
clothing – his, not yours!

Burp him after one side, then change his diaper. Now he’s
fully awake and comfortable, enjoy cuddling in his milk-
drunken glee.

Switch sides and finish the feeding. Baby needs to be full and
awake by the end of his meal. The blast of air on his tush
during the diaper change helped.

The double-whammy of baby happiness – after feeding him,
enjoy some awake time together then put him back to bed
awake. He’ll learn to fall asleep by himself, happy and full.

By: Sue LaPointe,
MOPS Murray Hill

When I first started hearing about the "breast/bottlefeeding"
debate, it was when I was pregnant with my son, MJ. Being the
level-headed realist that I am, I just knew that when the time came, I
would approach the subject with calmness and decorum and my
soon to be offspring would latch on as seamlessly as babies have
done since the beginning of time. Of course I got the prerequisite,
"It's so much better for the baby," and "my breast fed child never
got ear infections," and, what I found to be the most convincing, "it
is a time for you and your baby to bond."

What a load of malarkey!

From the very first time I tried to breast feed my hungry little gift
from God, it hurt. It hurts me now to even think about it, and the
child is 15 months old! In the hospital, when everything hurt, I don't
think it bothered me that much, obviously other areas were getting
my attention. But when we got home and my precious little angel
wanted to eat every 2 hours, bonding was not what was on my
mind. At that point, I was pretty much hoping for someone else to
come and claim him at least for the feeding. What surprised me
most was this over-reaching feeling of failure that I felt because I
didn't enjoy breastfeeding my son. I cried, we used that lanolin
stuff (which just made me sticky and sore instead of just sore), and
finally we tried those nipple barriers, which kept popping off in the
middle of a feeding, which of course made me cry.
All I wanted to do was concentrate on my son and getting to know
him, but I was constantly focused on the pain I was in (or about to
be in in another X hours) that and the failure I felt at not being good
at what is described at the most natural of motherly functions.
Three weeks into it, I finally snapped. No more "try the football
hold" or "pull down on his chin," I was through! This son of mine
would just have to be bottle-fed and if he turns into a sociopath
because of it that would be my torment.
My mom is the one who suggested pumping and giving him my
breast milk in a bottle. My mom is the one who showed me how to
hook up to the pump, and didn't even mention cows when I looked
like a one-person dairy. And it was my mom who told me that being
a good mother was so much more about unconditional love and
support than it was about breastfeeding.
So, sitting here with my 27 pound little-man in my lap, do I feel like
less of a mother because I bottle-fed him my breast milk? Or would
I feel like a failure if I had given him formula? The resounding
answer is NO! Look, the most we can hope for is our children to
grow up and make the world a little better because of how we
raised them. In another 20 years my son will always remember that
I taught him how to stand up for other people. He probably won't
remember so much whether he was breast or bottle fed during the
first year of his life.

Vivian Greentree