Additional Needs

World Breastfeeding Week

Posted by Amy Sweeney on 31st July 2018 Additional Needs, Advice & Support

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It’s world breastfeeding week!

A week to raise awareness and celebrate the wonderful thing that is breastfeeding!

The most natural and beautiful thing for a mother and her baby.

So why is my picture on this blog not a picture of me breastfeeding my child?

Well, that’s my Breast milk in that little tube!

With my first child, I didn’t try to breastfeed.

I always knew I wanted to feed her formula, I don’t really know my reasons but that’s just how I felt at that time and that’s ok!

She’s now a very happy and healthy 3-year-old.

Then when my son was born prematurely I was told that to give him the best chance possible I was to express my milk.

Something I didn’t realise until the nurses told me that day was that your body knows that you have given birth early and your milk changes to care for your little preemie.

How amazing is that?!

Our bodies are incredible, really.

So, I expressed for my little boy and actually took to it quite quickly, I didn’t particularly enjoy being attached to a machine so I knew that as soon as he was ready then I would try and breastfeed him, I was excited for this!

But when we thought he was ready and I started trying to breastfeed him, he really struggled to latch on.

Eventually one of the nurses told me that this can be common in premature babies and maybe we should try a bottle... I felt heartbroken!

But at the time I thought to myself, if we wanted to get out of NICU any time soon then that would be the best thing to do!

Sometimes I wish I had persisted and then other times I’m glad I made the decision to bottle feed because he may never have learned to latch on! He did have my breast milk for quite a while which definitely helped him in those early days when he was so small and poorly.

When I think of breastfeeding, I think of the most natural thing for a mother and her baby.

Unfortunately, there’s still people out there that think that breastfeeding a baby should be done in private.

There’s also some people that think this is “disgusting” (I struggled to even write that down because I honestly can’t believe it...) yet, when you visit a farm and see a cow getting milked, what do you think?

Probably not a lot!

Or a pig feeding her little piglets, you probably think “aww so cute!”

So why, when a human does it, does it become something we have to question?

I didn’t breastfeed but I did give my premature baby my breast milk and for that, I am extremely proud of my body.

I fully support mums whether they decide to breastfeed or bottle feed, but it does break my heart when I see someone looking nervous as they feed their child in public!

It should absolutely not be this way at all, we all eat in public so why shouldn’t a baby?

It is not sexual, it is not disgusting.

It is a mother feeding her baby.

No, she doesn’t have to cover up and no, she doesn’t need to do it indoors.

Happy world breastfeeding week to everyone, let’s continue to normalise breastfeeding.