<p>Happy birthday EmeraldKitty!!! I hope you do something wonderful today.</p>
<p>I totally agree that breastfeeding should be a family arrangement. I can’t tell you how many women I saw when in LLL stop earlier than they would like (or not begin at all) because their husbands were opposed. Personally, with my oldest one my mother was the opposition force and her support could have been very helpful.</p>
<p>Another mom here who loved those breastfeeding years, and it WAS years with 4 Ds. 
I adored that feeling of cradling my babies next to me and, in truth, I loved those middle-of-the-night feedings. I honestly don’t know what kind of tangible benefits it had for my Ds, but I do know that it was wonderful for me. With one of my Ds, my dad died suddenly when I was still in the hospital after she was born. In the ensuing weeks which involved long trips of several hundred miles, with two toddlers and a newborn in tow, and arranging the funeral, dealing with a difficult family situation, etc., I stopped breastfeeding the newborn because I just could not do everything by myself. When things settled about three weeks later, I tried again, hoping that by some miracle, my milk would reappear, and it did! I truly think that it was something which helped me grieve in the following months. Mother nature is wonderful.</p>
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<p>I had one of those too. I had to carry her way over on the side, and she had a clear preference for facing outwards even then. I think she didn’t like being close to the smell of milk when she wasn’t nursing.</p>
<p>I had one who nursed for 22 months and one for 34 months before they gave it up on their own. On this thread, that makes me a slacker in the breastfeeding department. 
Of course, I always figured that being a slacker is what breastfeeding was all about. No bottles, no formula, no mess. Just hook the kid on and it shuts up. Dad gets to be a slacker, too, with a perfect excuse for not getting up during the night to feed the baby. It works for everybody.</p>
<p>I loved breastfeeding too, at least in part because it was the one thing my body ever figured out how to do successfully. I’m clumsy, I suck at sports, I have never had a clue about what to do with my hair, and I made a complete ass of myself during childbirth. But breastfeeding worked. What a pleasant surprise!</p>
<p>By the way, the kid who nursed for 34 months had SAT scores 200 points higher than those of the kid who nursed for 22 months. But this is probably irrelevant.</p>
<p>My S was another who didn’t much like cuddling. Every time I tried to sleep when he was in utero, he’s start moving a tremendous amount. In the hospital, he was lifting his head & neck & gazing about. He was flipping from back to stomach & back again in the hospital nursery, as well. I could never leave him alone on any flat surface except the floor, for fear he’d fall to the ground. He would actually arch his whole body away from you when he wanted to look around. He was waking every 2 hours until he was 18 months old & beyond. He’s still not a very cuddly guy & likes a lot of personal space. For what it’s worth, he decided he had no interest in nursing at 9 months & just went straight to the cup.
His sister was mellower in utero & slept thru the night at 5 weeks. She loved cuddling l& does to this day & loves having a group of friends. She decided to stop nursing at age 18 months & went straight to a cup as well.</p>
<p>No freakin’ kidding!</p>
<p>The NYT article that was very pro-breast feeding included this little sidebar: women who breast feed are more educated, have higher IQs, higher incomes, and are more likely to be Asian or white. </p>
<p>Correlation does not equal causation… let’s use these things called controls, first!</p>
<p>(Says Aries, who was not breast-fed, but wound up with a reasonably high IQ)</p>
<p>I breast fed both of mine as long as they would–and tried to push it a bit longer–but each of them lost interest when they could walk. I guess they felt too grown up to nurse then. I did miss it. My firstborn I used to call my marathon nurser. Either he was an incredibly hungry baby, or I just wasn’t too good at doing my job yet. I remember one day I decided to time how long I spent nursing, and I found out I spent over 8 hours at the task! It truly was a fulltime job! Fortunately, that stage only lasted until he started eating some solid foods.</p>
<p>Both of my boys liked to be carried. The firstborn was more mellow and also loved to spend time in his baby swing. The secondborn was seldom happy anywhere for long. I had to carry him facing outward (se he could see what was going on, perhaps), and bounce him the whole time to keep him from crying. I did develop strong arm muscles! This was the guy who hated babysitters. The few times we tried to go out and leave him with a sitter he cried for two hours straight. (We paid the sitter extra and stayed home for a long time after than.) We couldn’t leave him in the church nursery either, and he didn’t even like being held by his grandparents. This stage lasted until he was about two. Strangely enough, this one grew up to be the only extravert in our family, extremely friendly and quick to make friends. You just never know! (I like to think it was because I kept him close as long as he needed it, but who knows?)</p>
<p>Did breastfeeding make them smarter? don’t know, don’t care. That wasn’t why I did it.</p>
<p>Both my kids cried continuously if I left them anywhere (even with their dad) until they were two years old. Thereafter, they were fine being left because they knew we’d return. As you might suspect, we rarely left them initially because it was just too stressful for us & the saint who agreed to watch them. Both kids have since been very sociable & adapt fine to whatever situations they find themselves in.</p>
<p>I’ve never understood the purpose of jiggling a baby. Granted, I have literally no maternal instinct, but I’ve also never seen a baby quiet down after being jolted up and down. Rocked gently, yes; put in the car for a ride, yes; jiggling, no!</p>
<p>I’m observing the first non-nursee in the family; my sister recently adopted a five-month-old from Korea after nursing her first. He was bottle fed in his foster home, and he’s calm, cheerful, friendly, and much more comfortable being left with a sitter than my genetic niece was at his age. He coped with the transition between families (and countries and languages) with barely a protest. His big sister is having a rougher time adjusting than he is! It makes me think that whatever families do, we’re just working with what the child brings to the table.</p>
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Wow, you could be describing my S2! S1 seemed equally attached to both my husband and me, and his grandparents were the daycare provider until he was two. I could only nurse him for three months – it just didn’t work out when I returned to work. The GP would give him a bottle, just before I came during my lunch break to nurse him. He was the fussiest, most colicky baby on the planet, and I hoped formula would make him happier. Nothing did. He cried for six months solid, it seemed, and slept in sporadic one-hour naps. He didn’t sleep through the night until he was 14 months, and then it was just an occasional thing.</p>
<p>I was able to nurse S2 for a year, but it ended when I had to spend a lot of time at the hospital when my dad was ill. He was ready to be weaned, but I wasn’t. He was (and is) very attached, and would cry when I left him with his daddy to get a haircut! Yet, he has turned into the extrovert of the family. Isn’t it funny how these things go?</p>
<p>Being a naturally lazy mother, I never made a bottle in my life. Kids went to cups at a year.</p>
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<p>Mine went straight to the cup, too. It makes sense. If you get them on the bottle, you have to get them off the bottle. Why bother?</p>
<p>Of course, by official American Academy of Pediatrics standards, my kids and Weenie’s would have been judged developmentally deficient. One of the developmental milestones a baby is supposed to achieve by 9 months is “holds his own bottle.” Odd to see that in publications from an organization that allegedly supports at least 12 months of breastfeeding!</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.aap.org/healthtopics/stages.cfm[/url]”>Error | AAP;
<p>All I can say is 6 months or teeth…</p>
<p>"One of the developmental milestones a baby is supposed to achieve by 9 months is “holds his own bottle.” "</p>
<p>It doesn’t really matter. By the time they get to college, the fact that they can hold a bottle loses its value significantly. :)</p>
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<p>My daughter didn’t get her first tooth until she was 13 months old, and had weaned herself by then. So I was nervous when my son had a more normal teething schedule…but he never bit me, thankfully!</p>
<p>ariesathena,
When you are a mom with a fussy baby, you just keep trying things until you find something that works. And bouncing a baby in your arms is not really jolting them; it is a gentle bouncing. Perhaps it reminds them of the gentle bouncing they must have felt when they were inside Mom while she was walking.</p>
<p>I knew one couple who found the only way to get their fussy son to sleep at night was to hold him while bouncing on a minitrampoline. I don’t know if I would have gone to that extreme, but it worked for them–and they got their exercise at the same time!</p>
<p>1sokkermom,
LOL! I definitely agree with you about the bottle!</p>
<p>susantm, I had some younger friends who confessed the only way they could get their son to sleep was to bounce him up and down while singing “Walk Like A Man.”</p>
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Susan~</p>
<p>This is how my kids were too. The longest any of mine nursed was 20 months. Most of them lost interest right about the time they learned to walk. In fact, my second child (the one I mentioned above as hating cuddling) went on a nursing strike the day she took her first extended steps, and she would not EVER nurse again. I frantically called LLL as <em>I</em> wasn’t ready to give it up, but the suggestions seemed so outlandish (as in, get in a warm tub with her whenever she was hungry–and just who was gonna watch my toddler?? <em>LOL</em>) that I realized it was <em>my</em> issue and not my baby’s and quit trying to force the matter. </p>
<p>~berurah</p>
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<em>ROFLMAO</em> Count my kids in that deficient group too. Funny story–my kids were involved in Parents As Teachers, an early childhood program based on the teachings of Harvard’s Burton White. One of the things the program did was to issue the Denver Developmental Scale from time to time. There was this task that the kids had to do for one section of that test. The instructor would hand the kid a doll and a bottle and ask the kid to “feed the baby.” ALL of my kids were clueless!!! <em>lol</em> But at least one of them dropped the little bottle and held the baby to her chest. She got credit for that question! ;)</p>
<p>~b.</p>
<p>There’s nothing cuter than seeing your little boy nurse his stuffed animals. :)</p>