Breastfeeding has gone really well for my nursling and I. I make it and she eats it. The best part about breastfeeding is its portability and, of course, the anecdotes.
My favorite breastfeeding anecdote comes from the time we took Ellie to the Mac Store in downtown Chicago. We had to wait some time for our computer to be fixed and the baby needed to eat. It was the Magnificent Mile on a very hot July afternoon and there was nowhere remotely private to feed the baby indoors. The only seat-type-thing in a 2-block radius was a middle row, middle seat space in the Mac Store classroom where a session on using your computer as a digital recorder was already underway. I dragged a hungry, screaming baby over spectacled and goateed attendees to the middle seat and did my best to discretely feed the child but it was fairly obvious I was whipping my boob out while literally rubbing shoulders with my neighbors. The teacher was a 19-year-old red-headed kid whose eyes popped when he saw what I was doing but he kept his cool. I kept my eyes fixed straight on him so I didn’t have to make eye contact with my classmates. Thirty minutes later, I had a happy baby and the class ended. Dan asked me how things went and I replied “I should really start podcasting…”.
I also had an interesting cross-cultural experience breastfeeding. The men who packed our apartment were Mexican. Since I needed to be in the house for the packing to help direct things, I breastfed Ellie in the living room and bedroom. The packers would ask me questions or come and go through the apartment without seeming at all discomfited by the breastfeeding. The following day, our movers came and they were good old Irish-Polish Chicago types. My breastfeeding really unnerved them and each time they entered the same room as an eating Ellie, they would backtrack and cast their eyes down.
The only time I ever truly horrified someone breastfeeding was when we were having new rain gutters put on the house. I was feeding the baby completely topless when (and I really should have seen it coming), a man appeared right outside her second-story window. I tried to cover up but I had no available item with which to do so. When Daniel went to say good-bye to the workman, he came upon the man who saw me beginning a sentence to his friends with “I mean, if you’re going to breastfeed…”. He stopped the minute Daniel came up behind him.
But besides making the occasional non-Mexican uncomfortable, breastfeeding is great. And it is working: we had a pediatrician appointment today and Ellie is 13 lbs, 5 oz (51st %ile) and 26 inches (97th %ile).
She is one tall glass of milk.
Please send that story to Apple marketing. So great.
I was prepared to have to encourage Sarah to whip it out in public. She is shockingly unreserved about it. Now it’s at the point where I’m anxiously waiting our first confrontation. What is with all these highly tolerant, progressive people, damn it? We need to go visit some Irish/Polish neighborhoods.