Monday, November 22, 2010

Pure and Simple - Breastfeeding Your Baby

I Love to Breastfeed. I have breastfed my son for a year and 2 months and now my daughter is currently breastfed. Breastfeeding really is a lot easier than bottle feeding and it is certainly a lot better for your baby. Companies making milk formula tell us how their formula is ‘the most like breast milk it has ever been’. Maybe this is true, but it never will be as good as breast milk. If you read the ingredients on the side of the tin you will find many of the following: vegetable oils; disodium guanosine-5, monophosphate, taurine, magnesium, sodium citrate, pantothenic acid, potassium chloride, beta-carotene and biotin. What exactly is disodium guanosine-5? Companies have been making formula for only the past century; women have been making breast milk a lot longer than that. Also, formula is made for everyone’s baby, whereas a mother’s breast milk is unique; it’s made only for her child.

Getting up in the middle of the night to feed a baby is incredibly tiring. Why make it even more tiring than it already is by bottle feeding? When you bottle feed, you have to get out of bed and boil water, make the formula and then wait for it to cool before you can feed baby. When you breastfeed you don’t have to even get out of bed, if you child is in a crib beside you. You can feed your child and go back to sleep far sooner than if you bottle feed.

Some other things that make breastfeeding easier than bottle feeding aside from the ultimate thing - gets you back to being skinny or lose weight;

1. It’s cheaper.
2. It’s a lot easier to clean your breasts than a whole stack of bottles.
3. Breast milk doesn’t leave permanent stains on clothes, unlike formula.
4. You can go anywhere, at anytime on the spur of the moment. You don’t have to worry about having enough formula.
5. You also travel light; no need to bring a bag full of bottles and formula

Breastfeeding may be harder to get started than bottle-feeding for a lot of mothers, but the benefits outweigh these early problems. So, if you were thinking of bottle-feeding rather than breastfeeding, think again. Breast milk is pure goodness for your child and breastfeeding makes life a lot simpler for mothers.

Some books to consider:

Support for breast feeding mothers:

Storage supplies: