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.