Future mommy in the making

Sariah, upon seeing this picture: "Hey, I drinking out of your body!"

Sariah is obsessed with nursing right now. Several times a day I have a little hand come up and shove itself into my chest, while a sweet little voice says, "I was a baby, I drank milk from there?" Naturally, these conversations stir up a lot of emotion, but I don't let Sariah see that. "Yes, you did!" I reply cheerfully. Occasionally she responds, "But your body didn't have very much milk. I drank milk from bottles too?" "Yep, that's right. You did."

I've been surprised by her interest in this. I don't recall Dallin ever bringing this up or caring one way or the other if I brought it up. Maybe it's because she's a girl? I have worked hard to teach both my children about the ways that mothers care for their babies. I want them to grow up knowing the way things should be, but also having compassion and acceptance for people who must do things differently. It's a fine line to walk.

I try to point out nursing babies and nursing animals every chance I get. When we visited Old Deseret Village, a living history park, earlier this summer, I was ecstatic to see a mother goat nursing her babies and enthusiastically pointed it out to the kids, who watched, enthralled, for some time. Later on, we walked into one of the restored homes where a tired visitor sat cuddling her baby on a chair. Sariah immediately noticed that the baby was breastfeeding and headed toward the woman for a closer look. The poor woman was a tad embarrassed, I think. We walked into another room to give her some privacy, and it was all I could do to keep Sariah in there. She wanted to go back and see the baby. I'm glad she's learning that breastfeeding is what you do when you have a baby.

We are preparing to have a new baby come to our house. I am excited for my children to see things like babywearing, cosleeping, and breastfeeding up close and personal (though the closer I get to inducing lactation again, the more I wonder if it's a crazy idea). As we are trying to prepare the children for a new sibling, I naturally turn to books to help me. Do you have any idea how challenging it is to find an appropriate book to teach children about new babies? Most of the books that are friendly to adoptive families (meaning not too much focus on the pregnancy and birth part) are completely unfriendly to attachment parenting ways. I don't want my kids seeing nothing but bottles, strollers, bouncy seats, and cribs. However, the attachment-friendly books are too filled with experiences that don't reflect our family. All these visions of homebirth and extended nursing just don't illustrate what our lives will be like. I don't ever want my kids feeling that their lives aren't "normal", or that our family's experiences are second-best. I do want my kids seeing a bottle or two in a book, because bottles will of necessity be part of our family's way. Where is the happy medium? Where is the book about a baby joining his or her family through adoption, being worn and sharing a bed with Mom and Dad, being breastfed with a supplementer but having bottles too? Ha, there are none.

The book I eventually settled on was this one:

It mentions nothing about the mother's pregnancy or the baby's birth. The story begins once baby is home. All of the wonderful attachment parenting practices are illustrated. This baby sleeps in bed next to Mommy. There are multiple images of baby being worn in a sling. The book constantly reiterates the theme that babies need to be close to their caregivers and that when baby cries, all must respond immediately. There is a picture of Mommy nursing (alas, no supplementer, but I'll take what I can get!) and a picture of Daddy feeding baby a bottle. The story says that the bottle includes expressed breast milk, but we are easily able to change the wording to say that Mommy's body doesn't make enough milk for baby to drink, so baby gets bottles too. This family doesn't look like an adoptive family of course (they look very definitely genetically-related), but it will do.

I'm glad Sariah has such fond feelings about nursing. Right now she doesn't need to know all of the hurdles, or that in reality Mommy made practically NO milk for her. Someday she will know all of those things. Right now she just needs to know that both her Mom and her Birthmom nursed her. And that when she grows up, she can nurse her babies too. For now, she can nurse her dolls, which she does. And she can gleefully read story books and say, "Hey, look, that's where the pig feeds her babies!"