Written by Laura Lee Palmer

The breastfeeding debate. It’s something I feel very strongly about, and for obvious reasons it has been preying on my mind an awful lot recently. So I really feel the need to say my piece.

During my pregnancy I started following a lot of the ‘mum’ pages on Facebook. I was mortified by the amount of stories I would see on a daily basis about mums who had been abused for breastfeeding in public places. Although it disgusted me, it also made me feel nervous in case a similar thing happened to me – I consider myself to be a fairly strong person but I’m not sure I could have handled the ‘breastfeed bashers’ in my post-birth hormonal state. So I bought a hooter hider (fabulous name!) to avoid such an event, and even googled breast-feeding friendly places for my days out in town. Continue reading →

Written by Alaina Brown, and adapted from Facebook. You can see (and like!) the original post here.

I’m sharing my story, not for sympathy but to bring awareness to a topic that was never shared with me. Something I had heard of, but knew little about. Among all the advice and personal stories moms had shared with me, it was a subject no one touched. It is something I wish I would have been more educated on going into my pregnancy. Continue reading →

This story is an excerpt from KayLee of The Happily Average Blog, a mother who bottle fed her
daughter and breastfed her son after birth. You can read the full story here.

When I had my daughter it was three days after my eighteenth birthday . I WAS A BABY having a baby. I was very inexperienced, obviously.

My Lilah was born three weeks early, after a complicated pregnancy . She was small, and from the very get-go I wasn’t producing milk. I mean nothing, not even a little. My body just didn’t kick into gear to feed my baby.

And this broke my heart. Continue reading →

This article originally appeared on Jamie Quitain-Good’s blog The Starfish Diaries, in August 2013. It is reproduced here with her permission. 

At the hospital

We were expecting Bradley Boy to come out anytime between Christmas and New Year that year, but God knew how much we wanted to hold and kiss him so He sent him out a little early. One month early – he was born at 36 weeks and 5 days. And between the house moving (which by the way coincided perfectly with my nesting!) and planning for his arrival, thinking I still had a month to prepare, we were absolutely not ready when he came out.

His clothes were not washed.  His crib and car seat were not out. My hospital bag wasn’t ready. I thought I still had a month to get all those done. Everything else was not ready, but I knew there was one thing I was ready for. One thing I dreamed about night and day, one thing I talked to my husband incessantly about, one thing I knew I would do no matter what. I would give him the best and nothing less. I would BREASTFEED.
Continue reading →