The Beautiful Letdown

A breastfeeding blog that dabbles in tandem, extended nursing, gentle parenting and much more

Nursing in Public

July17

When I was nurs­ing K, those words were some­times enough to make me stay home. I used a nip­ple shield with him for the first 3 months. He also took for­ever to fin­ish a feed­ing. Maybe it wasn’t really for­ever, but 45 min­utes is a long time when you are sit­ting at the DMV or in Burger King. As I’ve said before, A is a dif­fer­ent nurser com­pletely. He eats a lot more often, but he is much faster. Com­pared to K’s 45 minute nurs­ing ses­sions, A is an olympic sprinter!

With K, I was usu­ally able to plan my out­ings and errands around his rather pre­dictable 3–4 hour eat­ing sched­ule. A has been com­pletely dif­fer­ent. Until he was 8 months old, he was still eat­ing at least every 1–1.5 hours. Since then, he’s spread his day­time feed­ings out to about every 2 or 2.5 hours. Because of that, I’ve had to nurse in pub­lic far more often than I did with K. In fact, just this past Tues­day, I had the oppor­tu­nity to nurse in our local Applebee’s. Many of you who fol­low breast­feed­ing news know that Applebee’s hasn’t had the best pub­lic­ity in regards to nurs­ing moms. I am pleased to say that no one bat­ted an eye. A was nurs­ing when the wait­ress brought our food. Then, when she came back to check on us, he was still nurs­ing. So, while oth­ers have had other expe­ri­ences, I have to say that Applebee’s is one place that is on my list of “thumbs up to nurs­ing” places in our area.

Great customer service does exist!

May25

I know that I have had sev­eral expe­ri­ences in dif­fer­ent restau­rants and stores that made me won­der, but I’m here to tell you that good (even great) cus­tomer ser­vice still exists!

One place you can find it is at Cot­ton­ba­bies. I have been buy­ing my cloth dia­pers from them. Last week, they had a sale and I bought 5 dia­pers. When I received them, I was get­ting them ready for the wash and I noticed that a large part of the seam around the elas­tic on the leg hole was com­ing out on one diaper.

I wrote an e-mail to their cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment on Mon­day evening (after hours) explain­ing my prob­lem and ask­ing what I should do. Well, yes­ter­day (Thurs­day), I received a phone call from Dee, I believe but I’m not sure on the name, at Cot­ton­ba­bies. She asked me a few ques­tions about my dia­per and the prob­lem with it. She then told me they’d mail me out a replace­ment as soon as pos­si­ble. Thanks, Cottonbabies!

A while ago I real­ized that so many times when we have a bad cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence, we tell every­one that we know about it. Unfor­tu­nately, this doesn’t hap­pen nearly as often when peo­ple have good expe­ri­ences. I just wanted to spread the word that I had a great cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence, and I am plan­ning on buy­ing more dia­pers from Cot­ton­ba­bies, because I know I can trust their ser­vice and their products.