My breastfeeding journey seems to have been morphing more and more into my role as a support-person for other people with breastfeeding issues, and absolutely I love it.

These two! All that love!

My own breastfeeding situation of late has been one with absolutely zero issues. Can you believe it?! Zero. Milk? Got it. Feeding to sleep? Doing it. Nipple problems? None. Biting? Nope. Sure, he wakes a stupid amount of times in the night and I deal with that by nursing him back to sleep within a minute (the vast majority of the time), and I dream of one day being able to sleep with fewer than six interruptions, but that is what I chose and that is what I continue to choose. And the days where I am not wearing my breastfeeding necklace are days where my chest and face end up covered in pinches and scratches… but hell, not a big deal. He has started to crawl up to me when he sees an opportune moment and tug at my shirt or just lunge his body full-force into my breasts, which I really find hilarious. At baby yoga the other day, I made the mistake of wearing a grey t-shirt, and ended up with mouth-shaped wet rings around my nipple when I was doing a lying-down pose. My glorious, funny boy! These are things that, I have discovered, seem to repulse some people, and are a large reason why many mothers choose to wean when their babies reach these milestones. But these things just fill me with such joy.

My Facebook breastfeeding support group is going great-guns and is something I am really happy with. I am offering support and advice (solicited, and she knows I am unqualified!) to friends traversing the slippery slopes of baby-weight charts and the introduction of solids. I am loving being able to help a friend figure out how she will maintain breastfeeding when she returns back to work at one year postpartum. And yesterday was a big one for me: I visited the house of a wonderful woman who I barely know (she’s in the FB group) and had the incredibly humbling experience of being the person who enabled her to feed her fussy little one in a baby-carrier, enabling her to more easily care for her older daughter who needs a great deal of assistance. I taught her how to best do it herself, and I fed my own baby in my carrier as a demonstration (handy!) and she watched the world unfold before her as she realised the changes that this will make to her life. So beautiful.

Umm.. I don’t even HAVE a breastfeeding photo! WHAT THE?!

My little one is eleven months now. I just realised yesterday that this means that I have almost managed to breastfeed him for an entire year. I can’t begin to articulate the significance of reaching that milestone… but we aren’t there yet. Nearly! 

So close to another major milestone too!

Edit: I was astonished that I didn’t have a breastfeeding photo! Not doing my advocacy and normalising job so well if I don’t even have a photo! So here is one from the hour after I wrote this. Now, is this breastfeeding? Or just face-planting in the general direction of my nipple? 😀