If you don’t want to read about nurs­ing, today’s a good day to take a break from the beau­ti­ful let­down.

First, nurs­ing bras. Who makes these things? Why do they all sag? I have yet to find a nurs­ing bra with good sup­port. Even when I take the lit­tle adjuster things (the plas­tic clasps on the bra that make the straps longer or shorter) and push them over the back of my shoul­ders, I am still not get­ting decent sup­port. I have been wear­ing nurs­ing bras since Novem­ber of 2005, and I’m still unim­pressed. Any suggestions?

Sec­ondly, nurs­ing in win­ter. I need some new win­ter clothes or some­thing. Nurs­ing in clothes that keep me warm is a tough job! Sweat­shirts are too bulky. Some of my under­shirts are a lit­tle too tight. Some shirts don’t work out that well with a nurs­ing tank­top. Sigh… Appar­ently, I’ve been hav­ing apparel issues lately.

Next, falling asleep while nurs­ing. Nei­ther of my boys have ever been the nurse to sleep type. A did for a while, but he stopped that quite a while ago. K never really nursed to sleep even as an infant. I’m not sure if it was the turkey or what, but in the past few days, both K and A have fallen asleep in my arms while nurs­ing. It’s such a sweet feel­ing. They’re just so sweet and pure and loving.

Then, there’s three years of nurs­ing and almost eigh­teen months of tan­dem nurs­ing. After three years of nurs­ing K and about 18 months of nurs­ing K and A, I’m start­ing to feel ready for K to get ready to wean. At this point, I don’t think that I will do any­thing about my feel­ings. If K isn’t ready to wean, I won’t push him. I’ve con­sid­ered lim­it­ing the num­ber of times he nurses in a day, but I don’t think that’s fair to him. If he did it out of bore­dom or habit, I might con­sider it. I don’t think he does though. I think he really needs to nurse in order to reestab­lish a con­nec­tion with me. This morn­ing, my par­ents were up with the boys while Jason and I got a bit more sleep (thanks a lot, Mom and Dad, we appre­ci­ate it). I heard Kael out­side the door at one point ask­ing for “mommy milk.” I heard him ask­ing for me a while later just as I was about to get up. When I came out to the liv­ing room, he said, “Kael needed you. My wanted mommy milk to feel bet­ter.” Now, really, how can I argue with that? I don’t, because I know he’s telling me the truth.

Finally, sup­port. I have the best fam­ily. They are all great about the nurs­ing and tan­dem nurs­ing. My mom nursed me for at least a year and a half. She nursed my brother until he was almost three. She’s always been very sup­port­ive of the boys nurs­ing. She encour­aged me to check out the local breast­feed­ing sup­port group which I have really enjoyed, and she was a huge help when both of the boys were new­borns. She sat up with me and helped me with dia­per changes and burp­ing. WONDERFUL! I know that some peo­ple are for­tu­nate enough to have sup­port when their babies are young, but as the baby grows, their sup­port fades away and they hear “when are you going to start that baby on formula/solds/cows milk?” or “when are you going to stop nurs­ing?” I have yet to hear either of those ques­tions. Of course, my boys both eat solids, but I *never* get asked when I’m going to wean! That means a lot to me. Also, over the week­end, my par­ents stayed here as did my brother and sister-in-law. They don’t have kids yet, so I’m not really sure what their thoughts on nurs­ing are, but I would never have had any rea­son to sus­pect they are any­thing but pos­i­tive and accept­ing. K nursed sev­eral times over the week­end, and A nursed MANY times. In fact, he nursed a cou­ple times at the din­ner table on Thurs­day dur­ing our Thanks­giv­ing din­ner, and no one bat­ted an eye.

It’s always nice for us when the 4th of July falls near the begin­ning or end of the week. We don’t have any fam­ily in town, so if it is near a week­end, either we or they can make a 3 day week­end out of it and take a trip. This week­end, Jason’s mom and dad came to visit us.

They drove up yes­ter­day, and brought A a sand­box as a gift for his first birth­day. It is very nice. They even bought sand that feels like beach sand! WOW! I want to go play in there once the kids are in bed. K seems to have made more use of it than A has so far. A sat in it yes­ter­day for a while and then started eat­ing the sand. Once he got tired of that, he was tired of the sand­box. K, how­ever, was happy to play in there all after­noon and again this morn­ing for almost the entire morning.

Part of the rea­son that they stayed overnight is that we are still try­ing to do a few odds and ends jobs around our house, and some­times those jobs are eas­ier with a sec­ond set of hands. This morn­ing, Jason and his dad worked on installing a fan in our main bath­room. This after­noon, they worked on build­ing a com­post bin. Jason found the plans for the bin on Lowe’s web­site, and I have to say it is much big­ger, nicer, and stur­dier than I antic­i­pated. We will have to do some seri­ous com­post­ing though with this thing.

Jason and his dad were only able to fin­ish about half of the com­post bin project. It said that it was a five hour project on the plans, but I think if I were help­ing, I could eas­ily help them turn it into a ten or twenty hour project. Just think of the fam­ily togeth­er­ness that could result from that help! So, now the bin is in our garage with the rest of the lum­ber wait­ing to be fin­ished. In fact, those things are right next to and on the cement pavers that we will be using in our next big project of re-landscaping the front of the house. That project may have to wait for our next long weekend…Labor Day!

Happy 4th of July!

This morn­ing, at my MOPS group, our speak­ers were a local cou­ple, and they talked about inti­macy in mar­riage. I know that when many peo­ple think of inti­macy, they think of sex. How­ever, this cou­ple talked about inti­macy out­side of sex. They talked about being open, hon­est, and vul­ner­a­ble with each other. They talked about spend­ing time together as friends and just being. It was great to see a cou­ple mar­ried 31+ years dis­cuss these issues. They also dis­cussed their ear­li­est mem­o­ries of inti­macy as being with their par­ents (her with her mom, and him with his dad).

The more I thought about inti­macy in rela­tion­ships, the more I thought about nurs­ing and breast­feed­ing. It’s a very pri­vate, inti­mate, and open rela­tion­ship that a child and a mom have while nurs­ing. Look­ing at my rela­tion­ships with both K and A, I can say that I really see a close­ness in my rela­tion­ship with K that I don’t have yet with A. Hav­ing spent at least a cou­ple hours a day nurs­ing him almost every day for the past 2 years has def­i­nitely devel­oped that rela­tion­ship. I also see an inti­macy in my rela­tion­ship with A that I didn’t have with K. Because A has been such a high-needs baby, I have so much time with him. It’s also been pretty intense time over the past seven months.

After hear­ing the cou­ple speak today, I began to think about my boys’ future rela­tion­ships, and I hope that in some way, hav­ing this rela­tion­ship with me will be the begin­ning of a life­time of expe­ri­ences that allow them to expe­ri­ence inti­macy (in many ways) with those in their futures.

This year for Thanks­giv­ing, we went to my in-laws’ house. It was a lot of fun, and I love spend­ing time there. On Thurs­day, it was our fam­ily (4), Jason’s par­ents (2), his older sis­ter and her fam­ily (3), and his brother and his fam­ily (5). So, in one house we had 8 adults and 6 kids and a new puppy. It was def­i­nitely a loud, ener­getic day. We stayed overnight and yes­ter­day Jason’s younger sis­ter and her fam­ily (5) came over, so there was 10 adults and 9 kids and a new puppy in the house.

When we’re there, there is so much going on and K doesn’t take good naps. He plays well while we’re there, but as we were leav­ing I noticed that he had cir­cles under his eyes. We got home tonight and he was pretty tired. We put him to bed at 7, and we haven’t heard from him since. Now, I’ll say again that I had a very good time and I love see­ing Jason’s fam­ily, but I’m not sure exactly what I did that made me so tired, but I fell asleep in the car on the way home and did the head bob for at least 25 miles.

*yawn* Both boys are in bed, and I’m think­ing it might be time to join them.

Q: what do you call a bee that makes milk instead of honey?

A: a boo-bee!

Thanks to Kiley for the joke and to Jason for the use of his phone to write this blog.

We are stay­ing at my husband’s par­ents’ house right now. It’s been a nice time to relax, eat, and spend time as a fam­ily. Although we only had to travel an hour from our house, it feels like a mini get away. I get extra hands to help with the baby and extra eyes for my tod­dler while being fed and taken care of.

I hope you all are hav­ing a happy Thanks­giv­ing. Any­one plan­ning to be at Aero­postale at 3:30 am when it opens? I won’t be there, you can count on that! I might only be half way done with my night­time feed­ings by then. Eleven o’clock at Cari­bou Cof­fee sounds like some­thing that is more my style.