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Tuesday, December 29, 2009

8 months old!

A few days late...we've been busy with family. 

The predominant theme this month is how big Dio is. Every day we get more comments and jokes about how big/heavy/chunky/dense/chubby/fat he is. He has a 7-week old cousin and next to her he's a freakish monster baby. He's usually pretty good natured, but I love this picture taken on Christmas morning. We all were tired and wanted more sleep.


A month ago, Dio had just started having occasional tastes of apples and oranges and bananas. Now he's eating something at almost every meal, mostly fruits and vegetables and occasionally pretzels or homemade bread. And of course plain Cheerios, which come in quite handy when I need to put him down for a minute and want to ward off a crying spell. It still seems strange that he's eating so much at this point, since Zari didn't have any solid foods at all until she was 10 months old. But Dio is eating with gusto and I don't know if I could have kept him away from food for that long. And all of that food is doing interesting things to his digestive system. Goodbye, sweet smelling runny breastmilk poop...hello stink!

I think Dio will walk in Zari's footsteps--literally--and walk almost as soon as he crawls. She crawled at 8 months and walked at 10. Dio wants to walk all the time, which means we have to walk him all around the house. He also loves standing up against the furniture. I've figured out that if I stand him at the coffee table with my feet on either side of him, I can read a book and he'll be happy for quite a while just standing and looking around. No crawling yet, and no interest in even trying out hands and knees positions at this point. He has started twisting over from a sitting position into a near crouch, and maybe he'll start crawling that way.



I feel envious of all those parents of 4-5-6-month-olds who sleep through the night (or at least 5-6 hour stretches). At best Dio sleeps 3 hour segments, maybe close to 4 when he first goes to bed. At worst he's up every hour at night. He doesn't always need to nurse to go back to sleep, but he does need help of some sort: shushing or cuddling or rocking. We've had a few really rough nights this week where Dio was up almost every hour all night, and then Zari woke up multiple times and/or talked in her sleep. We were like zombies in the mornings. Last night he only woke up every 3 hours, which felt amazing to me.

I just don't know what else to do to help him sleep longer stretches. I bundle him up, but leave at least one arm free so he doesn't struggle and get too mad trying to get free. I have Fuzzibunz on at night so he doesn't feel wet. I use white noise and/or a fan (or both!). When we're not at my parents, he starts off in another room and at some point in the middle of the night I bring him in with us. At my parent's house, he starts off in a portable crib and then spends the last half of the night in our bed. When it's warmer again, I might try leaving him in his room a bit more, but it's simply too cold right now to be out of the covers every 2-3 hours during the night. He's really good about falling asleep for naps and for bedtime without nursing. Usually I just set him down when he's relaxed but still awake, and he conks out really quickly. But at night, when he wakes, he needs help getting back down. Which is fine, and I don't at all resent snuggling him back to sleep (or kicking Eric and letting him do it!) But I would really, really love longer stretches of sleep...even 4-hour intervals would be heavenly.

We've been enjoying the snow: sledding, snow forts, snow tunnels, snow mountains, snow angels, snow drawings. And of course, eating snow! At home Zari just eats it straight from a cup or a bowl. But here the grandparents spoil her with maple syrup or raspberry syrup poured over the snow. I could do without the Minnesota temperatures, but at least it's been reasonable since we've been visiting. Reasonable = above 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-17 C).

Zari loves playing with her cousins. Yesterday they closed themselves in a tiny bathroom and played with glow sticks.


Morning snuggle earlier this month.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Quiet Christmas

It's a quiet Christmas evening here. We have a few feet of snow on the ground. All of the children are sleeping, except Zari (she's setting out foam alphabet squares). All of the adults are gone to a movie, except me. That's life when you have a baby. The dishwasher is doing the last load of dishes from our traditional German Christmas dinner of rouladen and rotkohl, along with sides of carrot souffle, peas, homemade dinner rolls, and steamed Christmas pudding with lemon sauce. The toys from the Christmas crackers are scattered around the dining room...I should make sure nothing is on the floor, since they are most definitely choking hazards for someone Dio's size. This Christmas we all--for the most part--gave handmade gifts to each other. I love the ideas everyone came up with. I'll take some pictures and post more about them later.

I don't want to spend too much time on the computer today. Since today's celebration is, at heart, about a baby's birth, I'll leave you with a lovely birth story from NieNie, aka Stephanie Nielson. (You can read a detailed account of her plane crash story here.)

Monday, December 21, 2009

Currently reading

I made a quick trip to the library last week (without kids! what a strange and liberating feeling) and grabbed several books off the shelf.

I first read Labor of Love: A Midwife's Memoir by Cara Muhlhahn. Cara was the home birth CNM featured in The Business of Being Born. It was a quick read, but not because it was particularly well-written or interesting. I found the book flat, rambling, and disjointed. The memoir was mostly about Cara's background and upbringing and not that much about her work as a midwife. I don't think it would have been published had she not already gained national recognition in the documentary.

I just finished Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years With a Midwife in Mali by Kris Holloway. I really liked it. Kris served in the Peace Corps and worked alongside Monique for two years. Monique served as her village's midwife/health care provider and faced incredible obstacles in her effort to improve health and save lives. Malians have one of the lowest per-capita income and highest maternal mortality rates in the world. The book devotes a portion to Monique's midwifery work, but the bulk of the memoir is about all of the other aspects of life in a rural Malian village: poverty, lack of education, malnutrition, living and housing conditions, village politics and community traditions, gender relations, etc. It's one of those books that makes me grateful for what I have and a little...well...sheepish at the complaints and concerns I have surrounding birth culture in the U.S. I still think birth reform in this country is important, but I also realize that we have it so easy in the grand scheme of things. We have the luxury of arguing about informed consent and refusal, about the politics of VBAC and ERCS, about the relative merits of pharmacological versus physiological methods of pain relief...while the women in Monique's village had no access to cesarean section at all. Eight years after Kris' Peace Corps service, Monique herself died in childbirth. She was giving birth in a hospital in a nearby larger town and wasn't even seen by a physician until two hours after her death.

If you want a good midwife's memoir, my all-time favorite is Peggy Vincent's Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife. I've read it probably 10+ times (I used to teach it as part of my freshman rhetoric classes at the University of Iowa) and it still makes me break out laughing. Other midwife memoirs I've read include:
And you can't mention midwives' stories without paying tribute to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Another historical look at an American Midwife is Mormon Midwife: The 1846-1888 Diaries of Patty Bartlett Sessions.

Midwife memoirs I haven't yet read:

    I pulled two books off the breastfeeding section: Spilled Milk: Breastfeeding Adventures and Advice from Less-Than Perfect Moms by Andy Steiner and Unbuttoned: Women Open Up About the Pleasures, Pains, and Politics of Breastfeeding. I enjoyed both books but I think I prefer Spilled Milk over Unbuttoned.

    Supposedly a collection of essays about breastfeeding, Unbuttoned seems to have a high concentration of uber-competitive, glad-to-be-weaning, supplementing, and/or formula feeding writers. You'll come away from reading this book thinking that breastfeeding is the world's ugliest, most competitive sport; that LLL members are Nazi ideologues bent on making all mothers feel guilty; that breastfeeding always entails excruciating pain, bloody nipples, and terrible inconvenience. Does the fact that most of the contributors come from New York City play a role in the tone of this book?  Hmmmm...

    I checked out another book because I needed to look up a reference for an article I'm writing: The Official Lamaze Guide: Giving Birth with Confidence by Judith Lothian. I had the pleasure of meeting Judith at the Lamaze Conference in October. I talked with her about the history of Lamaze's position on home birth (also for the article in progress).

    The last book I checked out was Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death, Revisited. It kept me occupied all during our 8-hour drive to Minnesota yesterday. A great read and makes a good companion book to Stiff by Mary Roach. I had another long talk with my dad about burial practices and am even more resolved to avoid traditional American funeral practices. The whole embalming/open casket/viewing/funeral home/airtight vault thing is really silly. I mean--if you're dead, who cares about a hermetically sealed coffin or the airbrushed makeup or the velvet-lined coffin? I'd like to either donate my body to science, be cremated (without embalming/casket/funeral home service as is increasingly common), or have a green home funeral & burial in a simple wood coffin or simply wrapped a shroud.

    Any good books you've read recently?

    Friday, December 18, 2009

    Joyful news

    If you've been watching CNN, you probably saw that Arizonan mom Joy Szabo had a successful second VBAC--but not without a fight and a 6-hour temporary move away from her family. I blogged about her story a few months ago in Elective(?) Repeat Cesareans. Take the time to read the CNN story (which includes links to other stories and articles) and watch the video about "How to get the birth you want."

    Reality Rounds has responded to the news of Szabo's VBAC, wondering if the public might see her story as one of (selfish) entitlement, rather than empowerment.

    CNM and MPH Nicole Deggins of It's Your Birth Right just blogged about what patient empowerment means to her. Her favorite thing about attending births is when she sees "The Shift." It happens after a laboring woman is ready to throw in the towel, after she is sure she can't do this anymore. Then..."The Shift" happens and the dynamic changes:
    Immediately after “The Shift” she gets a surge of energy from somewhere and then WOW! The miracle of birth and life happens. And as she delivers her baby, she realizes that YES not only could she do it...she just DID it and the pride, the energy, the happiness, the beauty of it all. OMG!!! If we could put it in a bottle we could send love and stop war around the globe.
    She has a lovely story of a young teenage mother with lots of emotional and personal baggage, a "social history that had worn her down." But she found her voice and her inner strength through giving birth.

    My bottom line on the Szabo drama: it's a great story of one woman's empowerment, determination, and courage to follow what she feels is right for her and her baby. But it's a story that shouldn't have happened in the first place. A pregnant woman shouldn't have to move six hours away and rent an apartment in a big city, away from her home and family during the final weeks of pregnancy, just to escape an unnecessary surgery that her local hospital would have forced on her by court order.

    Wednesday, December 16, 2009

    Modeling

    We've been renovating our upstairs bathroom--something we always intended to do, but a mysterious and worsening water leak compelled us to start on it this month. We ripped everything out: toilet, sink, ugly faux-wood paneling from the 1970s, cheap vinyl tiles, and plywood subfloor. Now we were down to the bones of the room: plaster walls, pink plank subfloors, rough plumbing.

    The next step was rebuliding the bathroom, step-by-step. We patched some holes in the floor, changed the heating vent location slightly, then installed a cement board (Hardibacker) subfloor. Zari helped by sweeping the floor. Two days ago, we cut and dry-fit the marble tiles. I was marking the tile locations for some rather tricky cuts, and Zari wanted to be in the middle of the action. She wanted my permanent marker, but I was able to keep her happy with a crayon. She "marked" the floor alongside me. Once the kids were sleeping, I installed the marble tiles by laying a thick bed of mortar over the cement board and squishing the tiles in place, being careful to create a strong suction seal with each tile.

    Last night, once the mortar was hardened enough to allow light foot traffic, I applied the grout. I went up this morning to polish off the grout residue while Eric played with Zari and Dio.

    The next job was to paint the wainscoting, baseboards, and char rail trim. When Dio was napping in the morning, Zari helped me paint everything down in our basement laundry room (too cold in the garage for painting--it was just 15 degrees F this morning). She really wanted to help paint, but it was getting difficult keeping the paint nice and smooth, not to mention keeping the paint out of her hair and clothes. So I came up with a great idea. I gave her a clean paintbrush and asked her to dust off all of the pieces before I painted them. I leaned them against the washing machine. She meticulously brushed down all of the pieces, carefully following each groove from top to bottom. If her brush went astray, she started over from the top, drawing the brush down in neat parallel lines.

    While we were working--me painting and her dusting--she said to me, "Good job, mama! You're doing such a great job." I had said those exact things to her minutes earlier, acknowledging her contribution to the work I was doing. Her comments made me thing how important it is to model behavior and skills to our children. And to let them work alongside us. Children don't make a distinction between work and play like adults do. Everything is play to them: sweeping, cleaning, cooking, painting, loading the dishwasher (all things Zari has helped me do in the past few days). We can come up with creative ways to allow very young children to "help," giving them a sense of purpose, importance, and, of course, enjoyment.

    For example, when I'm cleaning the bathroom, nothing makes Zari happier than to give her a bottle of "special spray" (either a dilute vinegar solution or just plain water) and a washcloth and let her go to town. She'll easily spend 30-60 minutes spraying and wiping the sink and shower and floor. She knows that my job is to use the "stinky spray" (bathroom cleaners) for the toilet and mirror.

    How have you helped model important life skills with your own children? Or, if you're not yet a parent yourself, what did your parents do when you were young?

    Sunday, December 13, 2009

    Emergency deliveries

    Here's a roundup of recent "emergency deliveries." It happens in planes! In living rooms! In bathrooms! Via Blackberries! I've included highlights from each story. Bolding is mine. Feel free to laugh, cry, or roll your eyes.

    My commentary:
    • what's with the hullabaloo over clamping/cutting the umbilical cord?
    • good thing a doctor can go to medical school, not deliver a baby since the 1970s, and get all credit for doing nothing more than tying a knot in a shoelace
    • How come the dads get all the glory for doing simple things like using a Blackberry or being on the phone with an emergency responder? Isn't it the mom who's doing all the work here? Give her some credit!

    Baby Boy Delivered 30,000 Feet Over Colorado aka "Magic Doctor Does The Honors"
    A Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago to Salt Lake City diverted to Denver on Friday after a woman gave birth to a healthy baby boy at 30,000 feet. A suburban Chicago doctor who hadn't delivered a baby since the mid 1970's did the honors in the sky over Colorado. When it was determined that the woman was not only in labor but wouldn't make it to either the intended destination or any other, she was moved to the rear of the aircraft where the doctor did his magic, tying the umbilical cord with his shoestring.
    Baby Starts Birth in Hospital Toilet aka "It's an emergency if you're not in bed--even in a hospital"
    A British woman said she started giving birth to her son in a bathroom after seven medical workers told her she was not in labor. Janet Clark, 38, said she was 25 weeks pregnant when she went into the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, England, with a great deal of pain and was sent home after talking to a doctor and four midwives, The Sun reported Monday. Clark said she returned to the hospital the next day and went into the bathroom after being told by two more medical workers that she was not in labor and had nothing to worry about. However, Clark said her son, Zac, began to arrive while she was on the toilet. "A pregnant woman shouldn't have to plead with medical staff," Clark said after giving birth to Zac, who hospital staff said needed special care at first but is now doing well.
    Young woman delivers her own baby at home in Mackay, aka "Wow! You mean delivering babies isn't just something doctors do?"
    JANE Santacaterina never wanted a homebirth but nobody told her baby. Little Braithe Williams arrived in such a hurry on Sunday afternoon, his mother did not even make it to the car. "My partner and I live at Dysart (in central Queensland) and I'd come to stay with my Mum at Andergrove for the last two weeks of my pregnancy, so I'd be closer to Mackay Hospital," said Jane, 20, yesterday. "When the labour pains started I went to get into the car and landed on the loungeroom floor. That's where I stayed."

    With her contractions coming every two minutes, mother Ruth Santacaterina rang through to Queensland Ambulance Service emergency medical dispatcher Leighton Smith in Rockhampton. "He was brilliant, so calm. He told me what to do and I did it," Mrs Santacaterina said.
    Fast-Tracked: Home birth quite a surprise for couple aka "Good thing dad was an EMT"
    Maria and Michael Hernandez of Modesto never planned a home birth for their second child. It just happened that way and it went remarkably well. "It was like something on TV or a reality show," Maria said Tuesday, holding her daughter, Brianna. "I'm just glad my husband was there to calm me."...

    Friday, her husband took her to Kaiser Modesto Medical Center for what they thought would be a routine birth, but after more than four hours, hospital staff sent them home to wait for Maria's contractions to get stronger. At 8:40 that evening, Maria's labor pains were getting worse and became intolerable by 9 p.m. As they prepared to return to the hospital, Maria went into the bathroom and her water broke. Soon after Michael ran to assist her, the baby's head was crowning, he said.

    Michael said his training as an emergency medical technician kicked in. He spread towels on the floor in the bedroom and helped his wife to lie down. "As soon as she was on the floor, the baby was coming by herself," he said. "The majority of her head was coming out."

    His mother, Maxine Mosqueda, was on the phone with a 911 dispatcher and they could hear the sirens of emergency vehicles responding to the call. The baby's head emerged, and the baby let out a cry. With another contraction, her shoulders pushed through and Michael pulled her out. He was clamping the umbilical cord when Modesto firefighters came into the room. Brianna Addison Hernandez was born at 9:17 p.m. Friday. She weighed 7 pounds, 1 ounce, and was 21 inches long.

    As emergency personnel took mother and child to the ambulance, the parents passed through a sea of neighbors gathered outside the home. The baby appeared healthy and began to nurse during the ambulance ride to the hospital, the parents said....

    Hernandez said the birth certificate, giving their home as the place of birth and noting the father delivered the baby, is something they will treasure. Maria was able to give birth without all the intravenous lines and noisy medical equipment. "It was scary, but now I think it was the most natural thing that could have happened," she said.
    Dad's web guide to delivering tot aka "Blackberry Birth"
    Desperate dad Leroy Smith resorted to Google with the request "how to deliver a baby" when his wife went into labour. He was so clueless when wife Emma suddenly started to give birth at home he opted to use the internet.

    Mr Smith called a midwife for advice but before she arrived Emma, 25, began having powerful contractions. So the 29-year-old grabbed hold of his BlackBerry, accessed the internet and sought help from search engine Google for step-by-step instructions. And after following the detailed guide on the internet's wikiHow Emma safely gave birth to daughter 6lb 11oz Mahalia Merita Angela Smith....

    "The BlackBerry told me that when I saw the head, I had to support it. And when the baby actually comes out, I had to place her on Emma's chest, then covered them both with a blanket and make sure they were both comfortable and relaxed. It was amazing. It was just us two in the house because the other kids were with their grandma - Emma's mum. The midwife arrived about five minutes after the birth and told me I'd done good. She clamped the umbilical cord and I cut it."

    Mr Smith, a security guard, added: "I couldn't believe I had done it and Emma was such a soldier, no pain relief or anything. I knew the midwife was on her way but Emma went into labour very quickly, the whole thing only took about 40 minutes."...

    Proud mum-of-four Emma, of Leytonstone, East London, said: "It's incredible that Leroy delivered our first daughter. The other three are boys. "I said to him 'you're Leroy Smith, you can do anything'. I had wanted a home birth anyway. And thank God for the BlackBerry, I'm never going to moan at Leroy about being on the phone again."

    "Orgasmic Birth" giveaway winner

    I re-read through all of the comments for the Orgasmic Birth giveaway. Thanks for all of your helpful questions and commentaries. I'll be putting together the most interesting questions for when I interview the filmmaker Debra Pascali-Bonaro.

    I usually select giveaway winners using a random number generator, but this time I took the liberty of selecting a winner myself. I wanted someone who would be able to use the film not only for their own personal viewing, but also for educating and inspiring other women. And that person, to me, is...doctorjen! She's a family physician in a small rural town and attends about 70-80 births a year. (If you want to read more about the births she attends, browse through the archives of this blog. You'll see birth stories and commentary by her.) The film would make a great addition to her lending library.

    Saturday, December 12, 2009

    Call for LDS pregnancy, birth, and postpartum stories

    If you are LDS and have stories/insights to share about your pregnancy, birth, or postpartum experiences, please contact Felice Austin at The Gift of Giving Life. She's writing a book "to encourage women of [the LDS] faith to make conscious choices about pregnancy, birth, and beyond." I'm honored to be collaborating with her on this project. Your stories can be long or short and can cover a range of topics. Please send in your stories soon; she'd like to receive all stories by the end of January.

    Wednesday, December 09, 2009

    Nursing Moses

    Charles Moses Martin Goodrich began his life as a motherless baby. His mother died of an amniotic fluid embolism (a very rare and very fatal obstetrical complication) less than12 hours after she gave birth. What happened next was nothing short of miraculous. Over 20 women in the community of Marquette, Michigan arranged to nurse baby Moses round-the-clock.
    The more than two dozen other women who've nursed Moses know they cannot replace what was lost hours after he was born. But the father they've reached out to help says they've given his son something he could have never provided on his own. He's a healthy, happy, well-adjusted boy," he said, "who has always known a mother's love."
    Read the rest of the story here.

    Tuesday, December 08, 2009

    Babies (the movie)

    The Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog alerted me to a new documentary coming out this April: Babies.  It follows four babies from Namibia, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Mongolia through their first year of life. I can't wait to see it!

    Sunday, December 06, 2009

    Grand finale

    I came home from this evening's orchestra concern on a post-Beethoven high. There's nothing like playing Beethoven's 5th to get your muscles working and your spirits soaring. I was hoping for a nice relaxing evening. But instead, I found a string of posts that got me worked up all over again.

    Jill at The Unnecesarean started it all with two posts: Stuff White People Like: Talking About Birth and Convincing White Women that Birth is Painless Will End 'Race Suicide'

    Which got Reality Rounds' creative juices flowing with A Birth Blogger Rap

    And our intrepid OB/GYN student over at Mom's Tinfoil Hat wrote three replies-turned-posts.
    Reply turned post, need to walk away style
    Reply turned post, Dr. Amy is still there? style
    Reply turned post, Dr. Amy style

    I am doing my best not to get sucked in...you know, like this person:

    Friday, December 04, 2009

    Musical breasts

    Our university orchestra, in which I play second violin, had a dress rehearsal this afternoon. I made extra certain that Eric could be home to watch the kids. He came home early from work and I ran off to the rehearsal, about a 10-minute walk away. I was bundled up in my winter jacket, hat, scarf, and mittens and still the cold was seeping through all of the layers. When I got to the auditorium, there were no string players to be seen. I realized that I had read the schedule too quickly and that the woodwinds were rehearsing first. And I also realized that Dio hadn't nursed for a few hours. There was no way he would be able to make it another two hours until the rehearsal was over. So I speedwalked back home, nursed Dio in a few minutes flat (urging him on with "nurse! nurse!" whenever he got distracted), and hurried back.

    I was chatting with several other orchestra members, mostly men and women with grown children, about how I am going to manage nursing and bedtime on concert night. Several of them reminisced fondly about their nursing days and said, "I totally understand what you're dealing with!" One woman joked with me about letdowns that take you by surprise.

    We'll see how the concert goes this Sunday. It will be another day of musical breasts, of nursing between tuning and curtain call.

    Wednesday, December 02, 2009

    Breastfeeding in church

    I come from a religious culture that is fairly breastfeeding-friendly (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or LDS/Mormon for short). No one bats an eye at large families. (I come from a family with 5 children, and my husband is the oldest of 7. There were 8 children in my mom's family and 6 in my dad's.) Many more women in our church breastfeed than is average for North America.

    Our meetinghouses usually have a room called a "Mother's Lounge," a place for women to go to nurse their babies or calm crying children, etc. I've seen some really nice mother's rooms with several comfy rockers, a changing table, and a sink. I've also seen some fairly cramped and unpleasant ones. The building in my town has a tiny room that was recently converted into a makeshift mother's room. It has an old padded armchair and a small side table. The last place I lived, the mother's room was off in a far corner of the church. The furniture was from the 1970s and I tried not to think about the numerous body fluids that had been spilled onto the old overstuffed couch. It was icy cold and always smelled strongly of poop and pee. I didn't go in there unless I really, really needed to take a nap along with my daughter! Some church buildings do not have mother's lounges at all.

    Although I am glad that we have mother's lounges, I feel strongly that we shouldn't be expected to only nurse there and nowhere else. I almost always nurse in the pews, unless my baby is particularly loud and fussy. Then I go into the lobby to nurse until they have quieted down. Jane of Seagull Fountain just wrote a post about this, actually, feeling that mother's lounges can quickly become "ghettos" where women are supposed to go to do unmentionable stuff like, say, feed a child from their own breasts. Read her post You don't need an inner city to have a ghetto.

    I've never got any grief about nursing in public from other church members, although I have heard of women in other LDS congregations who have. I guess because some churchgoers "immodest" or "indecent" or "licentious," somehow. TopHat, another LDS mama, discusses why she doesn't think breastfeeding in church is immodest. Jane of Seagull Fountain wrote this in Comfort Zone:
    let me share my joy [about breastfeeding] without thinking I’m criticizing you or diminishing you.

    Unless you think breastfeeding is something that should be hidden or something weird or something to be done under cover, in that small room, or only as long as “nothing shows” or no one is inconvenienced.

    Then I am criticizing you, and I’m saying you’re mistaken.

    And this includes people who are afraid that exposing (young) men to women breastfeeding will somehow harm them morally. I can’t even believe I typed that sentence. It is completely illogical. Letting young men see what breasts are for will LET THEM SEE WHAT BREASTS ARE FOR.
    What have your breastfeeding experiences been like at your church? Where do women usually nurse their babies? Do you have special rooms set aside for nursing or for noisy children? Is it expected that you go to these rooms, or do you feel welcome to nurse wherever you want to? Have you ever received praise or criticism for breastfeeding your babies in church?