Podcast | Feeding Babies

Look at baby Jude here!

When I was expecting my first child, I was more nervous about breastfeeding than I was about birthing, which says a lot because I had planned to have an unmedicated home birth. I was admittedly cavalier about the birth, but incredibly trepidatious about the task of feeding my baby. In the months leading up to Jude's birth, I asked every mom I knew about breastfeeding and formula feeding, and I was only met with horror stories. It hurts! You may bleed! Your milk may not come in! The baby won't thrive! The baby will have allergies! You have to try a million different bottles and formulas! You'll be washing bottles 100 times a day!

So I did what any insomniac with an Amazon Prime account would do: I ordered all the things! Ice packs and lotions and gels and shields and pumps and bottles and different nipples, and do you know what? Everything was just fine.

Yes, my boobs swelled 200% and I navigated nursing with a wayward duct, but in the end, my baby ate and that's really all I wanted.

That's all most moms want when it comes to feeding their babies, right? So I'm not sure how this become such a divisive issue. If you breastfed, CHEERS! If you bottle fed, CHEERS! No matter how you got it done, it was a lot of work, you lost some sleep, but you got to experience some sweet bonding time. And in the end? Even if it didn't turn out just the way you wanted, you provided what you could and your baby ate. Now if only all of our older kids would just eat what we put in front of them...