Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Two Breast-feeding Stories and a few questions

I may have told one or both of these before, but you can, ahem, suck it.

ONE

The day after The Boy was born we were still in the hospital. The Wife was nursing the boy. Since it was just the three of us and she was wearing a hospital gown, she had her top down.

There was a knock on the door and a doctor poked her head in and asked if it was OK for her to come in and talk to us about how things were going. We said sure.

What we hadn’t thought about was that it was a teaching hospital. Which meant that doctors make rounds with students. Which meant that about 8 different people walked into the room at once.

The Wife never flinched. The Boy was happily nursing (something every mother-to-be worries about these days) and she wasn’t about to disturb him. The doctor asked how everything was going (fine) and if we had any questions (not really), talked for a few minutes and left.

I hadn’t noticed, but The Wife had, that the male students had been looking at the corners of the ceiling and walls rather than look anywhere near ZOMG NAKED BOOBIES.

TWO

There are a number of emotionally “freeing” things about planning to only have one kid. “Look, we’re only going to go through this once” makes a lot of things more tolerable.

One of them was breast-feeding.

There are some people who are absolutely off the wall when it comes to pro-breast-feeding, to the extent that mothers are made to feel that if she doesn’t, or is unable, to breastfeed (at least for 6 weeks), she’s made to feel like a failure. (Hence the fear mentioned above.)

The Boy was, by aaaaaallll accounts, amazingly simple. If he cried, something was wrong. But the worst noise we ever, ever heard him make was when we gave him a pacifier.

He took it out of his mouth.

Looked at it.

Threw it across the room.

And screamed bloody murder like we had never heard before (or since).

Last time we tried that.

He also would not take a bottle, even in the hospital.

So he nursed.

And nursed.

And nursed.

It seemed like a long time to me. The Wife said “When he’s done, he’s done.”

He eventually weaned himself (the last “meal” before bed was the last one to go).

About a week later we realized that his time had been the Thursday before Easter, aka “Maundy Thursday” or as most Christians know it: “The night of the Last Supper”.

(It was funny to us.)

Postscript: I haven’t read most of the breast-feeding posts, because I was off-Tumblr when it happened, so I only caught some of the last ripples and didn’t bother to go back and read them all. Which is to say that none of this is directed at any of you.

Q: Are nurses called nurses because “nursing” (breastfeeding) is comforting?

Q2: Why do they call it “nursing” a beer? It would be more accurate to say the beer is nursing you. With its hops-filled-boob-juice.

Q3: shirts that are designed to allow boob access for breastfeeding are called “convertibles”. At least by me. Free free to use it too…