We're moving today. Our new house just a few miles away, but it feels like just as much work as when we moved across the country. I'm going to be slow on email this weekend.
So things are a little crazy here at the moment, but I wanted to put up a post about something I've been thinking about a lot recently:
Whenever I see a baby being fed by bottle, I assume that the baby isn't breastfed. It sparks a chain of questions about why the mother isn't breastfeeding: Did she give it a try? Did she hit a lot of problems and stop? Was she under pressure from family not to breastfeed? This goes on for a while in my head.
The other day I was talking to a mother who told me that her baby, now five months, is exclusively breastfed, "except for a few times when we were out in public and I just gave her a bottle of formula." It occurred to me that if I saw her in public using a bottle I would have assumed that she wasn't breastfeeding.
Then I remembered being at a baby gathering at which I saw a mother give her baby a bottle. I assumed that the bottle contained formula, and then realized that the bottle probably contained pumped milk. This family had two moms, and the mother I saw was the non-birth mother, feeding her baby the birth mom's milk.
Then I thought of all of the mothers who exclusively pump. This is going to sound strange, but I've seen so many different colors of breastmilk that I sometimes can't tell the difference between breastmilk and formula when it's in a bottle. So some of those bottles I've seen may have contained breastmilk, too.
So, is the moral "don't judge a breast by a bottle?" What do you think?
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