Nursing with the big kids

A week or so after we brought Baby Three home from the hospital, my sister sent me an invitation to a Facebook group called something like “If you don’t want to see a baby nursing throw a blanket over your head.”

I laughed and clicked the “like” button.

I have nursed all three of my children, and it seems to have done all of us good. I know that it doesn’t work for everyone, and it was not always easy or pleasant – especially with Kid One, when neither one of us really knew what we were doing at first – and it is time-consuming and tiring. But the rewards, to me, make all the time and the occasional pain more than worth it.

Because once you get the hang of it, it is pleasant. It feels good for me and the baby. It gives her the nutrition she needs, nutrition made just for her, and it makes me sit down for a time and just hold her close.

I’ve also never seen the point of hiding away to feed my babies; especially at the beginning, when they want to nurse all the time, that would be really isolating.

But I’d also never nursed a baby with a 9-year-old boy in the house. I wasn’t sure how that would go.

Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Somewhere around the time my sister sent me that Facebook invitation, Kid Two—the 9-year-old—said to me, “I thought it would be weird having the baby feeding from you all the time. But it’s really just normal.”

And we went on with our lives. Baby Three has nursed at youth hockey games and minor league baseball games, in restaurants and parks, in the car, you name it. It boggles my mind to hear about mothers being hassled for nursing in public. It’s never happened to me with any of my kids. I’ve gotten a few strange looks, yes, which I’ve simply returned until the other person stopped staring. I have been offered more private places to nurse, if it would make me more comfortable, which I generally decline politely.

Don’t get me wrong—I try to be discreet about it, and I’ve found that if I don’t make a fuss, most people don’t even notice what I’m doing. At home, Kids One and Two often have to ask if I’m nursing Baby Three or just holding her, because it can be hard to tell. But yes, my son has seen my nipples when I’m getting Baby Three latched on or taking her off. No, he doesn’t seem embarrassed by that. I’m actually a little proud that he will grow up with the knowledge that women’s breasts serve a real purpose. Maybe it will make him a tad more respectful as he goes through adolescence.

Now that Baby Three is closing in on seven months, we actually nurse in public less and less, not because of any embarrassment but because she is so tuned in to the world around her, it’s hard for her to focus on nursing with a lot of other people around. I find myself shooing Kids One and Two out of the bedroom when I’m feeding her in the interests of getting some milk in her in a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise, she keeps stopping to look at them. She seems to be trying to make them laugh; when she succeeds, she laughs, too.