Two more exciting products to launch!

There are so many new and fun things happening at eLeMeNO-Pee and today I get to announce two more products that are awesome for nursing mothers!

LilyPadz are the first new product I get to showcase today and they are such an impressive product. LilyPadz are a revolutionary alternative to  traditional, standard nursing pads. They are breathable, flexible, invisible (no obvious, sightly traditional nursing pad peeking through clothing!), and the non-absorbent material conforms to breast for the perfect fit.



 LilyPadz are 100% silicone and the gentle, comfortable pressure of the pad works to prevent milk from leaking which is how these are so different from a traditional nursing pad that is designed to solely absorb the moisture. LilyPadz are receiving rave reviews and are sure to be a hit in your home, too!   One pair of LilyPadz can be used continuously for two months. We also carry the LilyPadz wipes for convenient on-the-go wipe downs and the LilyPadz wash for a more thorough cleaning each day at home. We also carry them in a size large for those who may need something a little bigger than the standard sized LilyPadz.




The second awesome product our nursing mothers will love is the  Undercover Mama nursing tank. The unique appeal of the Undercover Mama tank is that it is designed to attach to any nursing bra. It is not the same as a traditional tank - it simply attaches to your existing nursing bra.  Each shirt click here for a video demonstrating use). Your Undercover Mama tank won't bunch up, slide around, or ball up after washing. They fit where you need them to while keeping you covered in style. The generous length allows you to tuck it in or go for a layered look.  They also allow you to have two less bunglesome straps getting in the way while you're trying to nurse the baby - these tanks simply attach to any nursing bra to make every outfit easily compatible with nursing! I LOVE this design and cannot wait to personally try  it this fall!



All of these items are in-stock both online and in-store and ready to be added to your nursing necessities collection!

This is what it's like to breastfeed in a changing Southwest Louisiana in 2012.

The tide is turning toward breastfeeding in Louisiana.

This has been in the works on the national scene for a while. There are government-funded “Breast is Best” campaigns throughout the US and “Breastfeeding welcomed” signs on storefront windows in major cities. The news media regularly covers women’s legal right to nurse anywhere, at any time in 43 states. We’re all aware of NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s controversial Latch On campaign, his take on the World Health Organization’s Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative.

National and local governments have taken an interest in breastfeeding as a means of disease-prevention (because, I suspect, spending public advertising dollars encouraging women to breastfeed is easier and less controversial than tackling the public health crises caused by the food industry). There’s a now-twenty-years-old World Breastfeeding Week celebration (that’s Aug. 1 – 7), and August is National Breastfeeding Awareness Month.

And it should be mentioned that increasing numbers of mothers are plugged into Internet communities and in-person, locally organized social groups who gather to discuss topics related to mothering. Breastfeeding, like modern cloth diapers, sleep schedules, babywearing, and homemade purees vs. jarred food vs. babyled weaning, is bound to come up.

So I have to tell you, I don’t breastfeed because it will make my baby smarter, or healthier, or closer to me than she would be if she were fed with an alternative milk and nipple. Study after study, campaign after campaign tries to tell me this, but I have a hard time processing the comparisons. I’m really not convinced that those are the most appropriate reasons upon which to found a campaign for breastfeeding—or that the dominant media conversation should be one that centers on breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding. I don’t breastfeed because it’s ‘best’ or ‘better than’ formula-feeding… or because of anything related to formula (which is, despite some of the discourse you’ll find bandied about in ‘crunchy mom’ subcultures, real food that a baby can survive and thrive on, whether it is given as a maternal preference or out of circumstantial necessity) at all.

I breastfeed because it’s normal.

 

I mean it. And there’s a certain amount of privilege and luck behind that statement, I’ll admit it. I was set up for success by forces beyond my own control. I have had access to this idea that humans are mammals, and mammals nurse their young, for as long as I can remember: I was breastfed in the mid-‘80s by my working mother. My husband was breastfed by his mother, a homemaker who had seven children between 1976 and 1987 and wasn’t socially acquainted with anybody else in Lake Charles, La., who nursed. I watched my cousins being breastfed as I was growing up; I watched my sister-in-law struggle some through her nonetheless eventually successful first breastfeeding experience during my first pregnancy. I watched my sister pump milk for her premature triplets (well, okay, I didn’t watch, but I knew she was doing it). I was a part of those kinds of online women’s communities before I was ever pregnant. I had natural births, one of them at home, which is proven to make the nursing relationship easier to establish. And I stayed home with my first baby; I brought my second to both of my part-time jobs with me until she turned one.

I can’t imagine knowing how to be a mother without making milk (although I know that many, many good mothers throughout history have accomplished just that). For the first year of my babies’ lives, nursing hasn’t been about feeding at all, really. The transmission of calories was secondary. It was just what my babies did… often. It was my mothering paradigm, my primary means of mothering, what I spent most of my days doing: it was how my babies went to sleep, how they got their nutrition, how they got the antibodies to build strong immune systems, how they were reassured when the garish lights and unfamiliar sounds (or, later, the absolutely fascinating, MOMDIDYOUSEETHAT???! scenes) of, well, anywhere that wasn’t our home sent their tiny brains into overdrive. It’s how they overcame boredom when our priest’s homily ran over seven minutes. It’s how I distracted them from the pain of shots. It’s how they went about their everyday lives as infants.

There’s a great deal of evidence that suggests that human infants instinctively exhibit attachment-promoting behaviors to ensure their own survival. Very young babies cry to nurse every thirty minutes, not because they are hungry, not because they’re not getting ‘enough,’ and not because mom’s milk is ‘too thin,’ but because they don’t know that a tiger isn’t about to eat them. When a mother is casually nursing her baby while she stands at the stove and stirs her gumbo or sits at her oak desk writing depositions, she is still, despite her nonchalance, holding him closely in fierce protection, giving him sustenance that comes from her own body—and he gets that. He gets what that means. Maybe not on the poetic level that we do, but instinctively he knows that this is right. He is a mammal baby, and this is what mammals do under biologically normal circumstances. (It’s also the mechanism by which adequate milk supply is ensured. Supply management is not much of an issue, barring certain very real but also statistically rare medical conditions on mother or baby’s parts, when the pair is lucky enough to be able to share an ‘unrestricted access to the breast’ kind of daily routine.)

The ‘breast vs. bottle’ conversation in the media and even in medical circles so often becomes about feeding, but the fact is that breastfeeding is not purely a feeding choice. It’s a lifestyle choice. It’s choosing to be attached to a baby continuously or to make other arrangements that will not compromise the milk supply. It’s choosing to possibly even allow a child to remain, both literally and metaphorically, ‘attached’ for longer than we as a culture tend to think babyhood should last, for the sake of respecting the instinctive, paleological parameters of human child development rather than the culturally imposed ones--or it can be choosing some nuanced combination thereof.

It’s choosing to adopt a mothering paradigm that hasn’t been a popular one in our culture until recently, and women sense that. It’s okay for them to reject it; people have dignity and the agency to carve their own paths. But it’s also okay for them to embrace it.

I feel less and less alone as a breastfeeding mother in Southwest Louisiana. I am witnessing more and more local success stories—more and more women who attempt to establish breastfeeding are succeeding, are nursing exclusively to 6 months and then continuing nursing with complementary solid foods until 12 months and beyond. Many are pumping at work (rock stars!) and managing their milk supply with great care, learning the science of lactation and its delicate interplay with the endocrine system so intimately that they can pinpoint where they are in their fertility cycles by how many ounces of milk they are pumping on a given day.

The tide is turning because the support is there.  Information—the right information—is more accessible than it was even when my first child was born in early 2009. The La Leche League International chapter meetings in Lake Charles are teeming with new faces—and friendships—every month. Moms of twins, moms of preemies, moms who have more than one child but have never breastfed before, moms who work, moms who are inducing lactation for an adopted baby, moms who are in the military, moms who are women of color, these are the moms who are joining us for our monthly meetings now who weren’t joining us three years ago.

I don’t think the tide is turning because of the studies. I don’t think it’s because the medical establishment is supportive—because International Board Certified Lactation Consultants and other breastfeeding-minded medical practitioners in the United States have to fight daily against a system wherein breastfeeding is not normalized, where pregnant women are booby-trapped by their OB/Gyn practices with bags of 'free' baby product samples sponsored by formula companies before they schedule their first ultrasound.

The tide is turning because women are insisting that their biologically normal practice be recognized as a socially normal choice, and they’re having such a good time doing it that their friends are joining them.

Friends. That’s how we solve a public health crisis. Woman to woman, the way it’s always been done. And year by year, we’ll make it normal. Year by year, we’ll turn the tide.

Night-weaning, or: Can I get a venti anything... with an extra shot?

You know, normally I sit down to blog, and I want to talk about cloth diapers. I'm happy to talk about them aaaaalllll day long; it's how I got this job in the first place. What's a better diversion from my First World Problems, like running out of half-and-half or dealing with Instagram lagging on a 3g connection, than talking to other parents about those little bits of colorful, fluffy, money-saving, landfill-sparing, baby skin-pampering cuteness?

Let me tell you, though--I haven't even gotten around to washing diapers since we started night-weaning. (And thank goodness for that pack of gRefills I previously kept in my hurricane kit at the top of the hall closet....)

Oh, night-weaning. Night-weaning was a breeze with my oldest--or, at least it was for me. My husband valiantly handled it all. He knew I'd spent 15 months handling every second of the nighttime parenting, so he devised his own night-weaning scheme and stuck to it, gradually and gently teaching our little co-sleeper to sleep in his own room all night, and to calmly tell us over the baby monitor if he needed anything, assuring him and proving to him that one of us would be there to help him immediately, just like it had always been when he slept in our room.

But that was when my husband was working at his old job, with his old hours. This time, it has to be up to me, admittedly the less patient parent. And this time, I've spent 20 months nursing all.night.long. Why? Well, she's always been such a good sleeper as long as she had access to her milk!

She loves her bed... for playing!

Now, I know some of you are thinking, "Twenty months old is way too old to be finally night-weaning." And some of you are thinking, "Twenty months old? That's so young! I would never night-wean before age 2." And some of you are thinking, quite pleased with yourselves, "Ah ha! That's why I never started the habit of nursing to sleep! You should start as you mean to go on!"

Although I recognize that there are advantages to each of the above approaches, suffice it to say I have my reasons for doing things the way I've done them. A one-size approach can be fab-u-lous for cloth diapers (boy, can't it?), but every family's needs and dynamics are different. If I could go back and change the way I approached nursing and sleep up to this point, I wouldn't see a need to. But what I do need now is a plan.

Faithful readers know I'm a researcher. (If this is the first post you've encountered, then, hi! I'm the eLeMeNO-Pee blogger... and I'm the daughter of a career librarian, a 21st-century American parent, a coffee fiend, a night-owl, and a product of liberal arts education: in short, a researcher.) I've read plenty of night-weaning articles and chapters in books. Any approach or method you could tell me about, I'm at least a little familiar with. Yep, I have read Pantley, Sears, and Gordon. But at 3 am, our only "method" has been to bicker with each-half-asleep-other about which room I should take the hysterical toddler into, then apologize to each other for the bickering in a sheepish morning text-message exchange.

Monday night's plan was for my husband to go to our daughter, the subject of this little experiment in less lactating, who would be awakening on her mattress in the kids' room, and change her diaper (because she has recently begun waking when she wets her diaper, no matter if it's stay-dry cloth or a disposable gRefill), help her fall back asleep quickly, and put her in her brother's bed. Our hope was that having the milk-free parent parenting her back to sleep would cause her to fight less, and that having a snuggle partner would keep her asleep.

Somehow, though, I ended up with a 3 am bed mate who is about three feet shorter--and a lot less hairy--than my husband. And who had a wet diaper, and who, after her diaper change awakened her fully, cried desperately for milk, pawing at my clothes, for two hours, dozing in between her pleas while I rocked, held, bounced, paced, and tried to lie down beside her. What it comes down to is that my husband is not going to be able to help this time around, and I need a zip-up-the-back body suit that comes up to my chin.

During their waking hours, toddlers are decidedly single-minded creatures. Mine have thus far seemed particularly impliable (I wonder where they got that?). So I think that the key to nighttime peace--or relative peace--is going to be helping her achieve a daytime understanding of what will befall her come Mr. Moon's ascent in the sky. I've got a few ideas in mind to accomplish this, but I'm very interested in what worked for you, friends.

Some of you will have nightweaned babies who are younger or older than mine. Some of them will have been developmentally capable of understanding what was happening, and some of them were more easily "deceived" or distracted. But tell me this:

1) How old was your baby or toddler when you night-weaned?

2) How long did it take?

3) What was your system?

4) Did you have to be flexible with your system?

5) Were you co-sleeping when you began night-weaning? Did you choose to continue co-sleeping or to move your child to his or her own bed or room?

and, most importantly,

6) How much should I budget for extra coffee and coffee accoutrements (sugar, half-and-half)?

Thank you for your answers! You'll help me formulate a plan... and also realistic expectations for this whole thing.