Music time: Mommy's Favorites

I love Elizabeth Mitchell's children's music! She sings many of the old favorites we all know, with a folksey twist that is very enjoyable for adults (at least adults with tastes in music like mine). I've also discovered some new songs that I had never heard before through her music. She has several albums which you can learn more about here: http://youaremyflower.org and at least a few of them are available via spotify.

I'm also a big fan of her music videos on YouTube. They are just so sweet! Check out Sleep Eye if you want to see the kind of embarrassingly simple things that make me cry.

Harry Potter Reference for the Win!

This is what blogging is like for me:

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Breastmilk: The movie! Love it? Hate it? Please share!

I guess I will start with a quote from the director’s statement on their website:

“In a society that values efficiency, multitasking, and diagnostic solutions to problems, and in which women's roles are constantly changing, how does the practice of breastfeeding, with the slower pace it requires, fit in? Do we use pumps, medicine, and other means to make breastfeeding suit our schedules better, or should we change ourselves? These questions, along with the current state of women's politics, feminism, and reproductive health, made breastfeeding an irresistible subject for me”. http://breastmilkthemovie.com/director.html

 

Personally, I thought the movie was great. I mean just the fact that it was about breastfeeding in any sense made a win in my mind, but it is receiving a lot of criticism for showing breastfeeding in a negative light and being discouraging. Which I suppose is one way to look at it, but I think if you look at it that way you are missing the core message of the film. The point of the movie was to expose the challenges breastfeeding mothers face as a result of social factors and, at least in my opinion, it did a fantastic job doing that. Maybe I wasn’t surprised at the amount of difficulty the mothers in the film had because I have listened to all these issues on my beloved pod casts, and I was very aware of them prior to watching the film. Also, the movie has a major feminist flavor, which I of course love because that is a perspective that I share. 

At the very least the movie is a great conversation starter. There were so many quotes that I loved but here are my favorites:

“Because there’s lots of things that are good for us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we do them. Breastfeeding is one of those things that you have to be ridiculously, you have to be ridiculously competitive to do…There is a certain kind of push, an oomph that goes with breastfeeding, and you know the off chance your child is not going to be fat when he gets older is not going to do it”.

Pubic Health Nurse Patrece Griffith-Murray 

“I’m very much against the nurses rolling out the pump when the mother is 24 hours 48 hours post-partum. Because at that point the mothers don’t have a lot of milk, the have enough, but they don’t have a lot. And so by expressing milk or pumping milk at that particular point the only message they are getting is that I don’t have any milk. So you know to say that the pump tells you how much you are producing, is nonsense, it tells you how much you can pump. That’s not the same thing”.

Jack Newman, MD Founder, International Breastfeeding Center 

 “We as a culture in the United States have decided that publicly, that making mothers feel guilty about their infant feeding methods is wrong. But we are also a culture that has not made it easy for women to be successful in some of their infant feeding choices. So instead of actually making changes, we talk about guilt, we talk about, we talk about how much we care about mothers, we don’t want them to feel guilty but we don’t care enough about them to actually do things to change the possibilities of their  experiences. And so guilt operates as this rhetoric that forestalls change”.

Bernice L. Hausman, PhD 

I also loved the comments that the lesbian couple made about how in America there seems to be a distrust around women's bodies which sends the message that it is better to supplement in order to measure and know for certain how much a baby is getting. They continue to say, "I don’t think it’s statistically possible that the number of people that we met that have just said oh I didn’t have enough milk.” “We have met so many women who didn’t have enough milk”. “It’s just impossible.” I have thought the exact same thing! Which makes me very sad.

As with anything, there were of course some parts of the movie that I didn’t love 100%. I didn't really follow the talk of breasts being interpreted as phallic sometimes, because I don't see them as phallic in any way and I don't get the impression many people do, so I was a little confused about that. And the she completely lost me when she said " maybe it would be better to turn that around and look at the penis as breast-ly". I mean she obviously meant it in a very metaphoric sense, but she still lost me because I can't make that connection in my mind whatsoever. And the second thing was that the couple they interviewed in the bedroom, the guy with the long hair in a bun. I felt like the movie producers played up their "hippieness" a little too much by shooting them in bed, basically in their pajamas. Hopefully I'm wrong but I feel like it might make viewers take them less seriously because they will see them as a bit eccentric. I’m sure the couple are aware of their "hippieness" and value it, and that is awesome. And maybe the film producers thought showing them in that way helped the couple make their point about falling into certain childcare roles. I was just disappointed that it was one of the few times they even mentioned breastfeeding past one year in the film and I felt like it could almost add to the stereotype that only granolas or whatever feed their babies longer than a year, rather than promote the idea that it is completely normal.

I think it would be awesome if they did another sequel like they did the last one, and lucky for them I have already planned out the four sections ;) 

“More Breastmilk”

1.More on the actual unique properties of human milk

2. A deeper look at a successful breastfeeding experience. I think it would be beneficial to see the struggles that breastfeeding moms go through that are pretty common and yet can be overcome by just sticking with it (cluster feeds and nipple soreness for example).

3. More on the benefits and controversies around breastfeeding after a year.

4. A look at breastfeeding in a culture where long term nursing is widely accepted and successful.

Words of Wisdom on Breastfeeding from Ina May

"Your breasts will be many different sizes during your first two months of breastfeeding. If you are like most mothers, sometimes you will seem full to bursting, making you feel like a goddess of abundance, while at other times your breasts may seem deflated and empty. You are not unusual if you go from wondering what you are going to do with all the milk you have to worrying if there is going to be enough, all within a short space of time. Such a drastic change can be upsetting if you don't know that this amount of variation is normal in mothers who successfully breastfeed and that it does not mean that your milk is "drying up"....You may be surprised by the depth of your feels of responsibility for your baby. When you know that your baby's only food comes from your own chest and if that supply comes into doubt, it is easy to panic and go for something that seems more certain."

An excerpt from Babies, Breastfeeding and Bonding by Ina May Gaskin
These are definitely words to live by while breastfeeding. I can completely relate; it can be so hard to fully trust your body sometimes, especially at such a vulnerable time in your life. Just keep believing in yourself and keep up the good work!

My Favorite Baby Books

So, I am a major children's book fiend. I love them, and thankfully baby girl does too, so we read about a dozen a day. This is a list of MY absolute favorites; the ones I love because they are either extremely fun to read, have beautiful illustrations, or the overall message just tugs at my heart the right way. Luckily, baby girl likes most of my favorites too, it was only the Nancy Tilman books that she didn't really care for until recently. There are two other books that would have made the list if I owned them: Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes (Fox/Oxenbury) and Mama's Day (Ashman/Ormerod). I have borrowed both of these books from the library, fell in love with them, and will secure my own copies just as soon as I can justify making any more book purchases ;).

So without further ado:

Everywhere Babies, All the World, On the Night You Were Born, and Wherever You Are, My Love Will Find You, are my top favorites. Their messages are so simple and yet so powerful, they are beautifully illustrated, and my absolute favorite books always have rhyming text (that's just how I roll). The Margart Wise Brown books are my next favorites, they are always a hit with my baby girl and I really enjoy them as well. Of course everyone knows Goodnight Moon but it is the Big Red Barn, and all of the farm animals that live there, that I like best. Sleep Little Angel is a story of seasons and The Moon Shines Down is about different countries around the world. Brown's stories always have a certain charm to them, but it is the pictures in these books that really make them stand out to me. Time for Bed is my favorite book about going to bed; it is a very sweet poem with lovely illustrations. Llama Llama Red Pajama is just too much fun to read not to include it on my list and lastly, Margaret Miller's I Love Colors is so simple and yet so perfect. It not only is it the perfect book for teaching colors but it has some of the most adorable baby pictures I've seen in these kinds of books. I love how the photo's are cropped in really close to the face, I just think it makes the book very visually appealing.

More Playdough Fun!

Cloud dough or moon sand, I'm can't remember exactly what the pinterest world is calling this but it is just flour and oil. I melted some coconut oil I had in my cupboard so it would smell delicious. This dough is crumbly rather than stretchy, and I just mixed the two ingredients together until I got a consistency that I liked.

Ages and stages: 16 months

Hi babe, it's January 2nd and you are about half through your sixteenth month of life. But you have just been doing so much lately I felt I needed to record some of it! First of all you are saying SO MANY words. I think you say more words than you don't say at this point. Really you know so many animals, and foods, and basic vocabulary words it's crazy. Plus, you have learned your COLORS! Well, just the basic colors: red, blue, orange, yellow, green, and purple. Once in a while you mix up yellow and orange or blue and purple, but really, how amazing for how young you are! I was not expecting this until after two! You have also been stringing two words together more often. You have done "nigh night baby" for a while now but you have been saying things like "daddy's shoes", and other things that of course I can't think of now (one of the reasons why I wanted to get this written down asap, so I wouldn't forget and then go back and wonder when it started). Anyway, it's really cute and pretty amazing to watch you learn and get to see more what's going inside that little brain of yours.

Oh and you have been all about climbing lately! The fist time you climbed on a chair by yourself was over Christmas at grammies house (I think it was Christmas Eve to be exact). You had gotten up on the chair that was sitting by the step into the addition. A few days later when we were back home, while I was scooping out the squash, I looked over and you were standing up in the new stroller you got for you babies! Then you learned how to get up into our dining chairs. Daddy just ordered you a little climbing tower/slide activity center thing and it is supposed to arrive today so that will be fun! And hopefully satisfy some of your climbing urges. Fingers crossed!

We do all have colds right now, so that has been slightly frustrating. It has meant for a few sleeping challenges (taking long naps=great, going to bed late=not so great), eating less solids, and nursing more. But we will get through, and if some extra Sesame Street is my greatest fault as a parent, I can deal with that for a few days until we all feel better!