Last night Sarah and I went to the $30 BI breast feeding for expecting mothers class. It was the first time I have gone out in public to see movies of naked breasts with Sarah. We hadn’t eaten dinner before the seven o’clock class, and since the class was about feeding I rushed out of the car to the food court near the hospital to pick-up some McDonalds fast food. The food court had many options beyond the McDonalds but I had already taken the order from Sarah for two hamburgers and a Sprite so I was bound by duty to get the right stuff. The McDonalds was being worked by a staff entirely composed of Japanese people including one very industrious bearded guy that was trying to fix the machine that creates soy based ice cream products. The Japanese run McDonalds also had a high-tech credit card swiping and processing system. I highly recommend going there to see if you can experience the same odd staffing quirk.
At the breastfeeding class I was ravenously chomping down both on my fries and on the fries that I had gotten for Sarah figuring that she would ask for them sooner or later even though she didn’t order them. After all we were in a class dedicated to talking about feeding. Everyone went around the room to tell whether they had decided to breastfeed or not, most of them saying yes they were going to try and to try for six to twelve months. The instructor, an older nurse practitioner with the accent of Edith Bunker, proceeded to go through the many benefits of breastfeeding your child including: higher IQ, cheaper, more convenient, higher nutrition, greater immunity, lower allergies, better bonding in an interactive sales pitch.
Then we moved on to the more important discussion of how to breastfeed. Apparently the most important thing is to grab your breast, get the baby to open their mouth using the rooting reflex, then shove the breast as far into the baby’s mouth as possible. She had a saying that sounded like stop, drop, and roll that we were supposed to remember that went grab, stuff, and mush. The breasts, like the rest of the reproductive system, are very impressive beyond my standard male impression of playthings during sex and items that I am curious to see when covered. They have all sorts of functions and regulatory mechanisms for solving the problems of feeding including the breast milk containing lanolin to sooth and repair problems causing soreness, different ratios of water to fat in hind milk vs. stored milk that serves newborns who need hydration differently from infants that need energy.
We learned how to hold the baby using a doll named Patience and went over a couple of key positions. The first was a side angle where the baby is pushed tummy to tummy with the mother. It looked different from what I thought I had seen on television or in glimpses while looking away from other breastfeeding women to avoid looking like a peeping breast Tom. The baby was held perpendicular to the floor and across the mother’s body. This position apparently also works well lying down but we were not encouraged to try this in class. We also tried the football position where you hold the baby like a football, loosely like Kevin Falk did against the Steelers on Sunday, and push the baby up into the breast. The key factor in the football feeding position is to move the baby’s arm into an upward position so it doesn’t get in the way.
The question arose why fathers were involved in this breastfeeding class at all. It did appear that most of this was not something we could do because we lack mammary glands. While being supportive is important I was mainly focusing on the remaining hamburger that Sarah hadn’t eaten with all the talk of making sure you are feeding your baby well and the hunger wasn’t even diminished by talk of how many brown diapers vs. yellow ones to expect given that the imagery was fairly similar to a McDonalds hamburger anyways. The reason given beyond support was so that us men wouldn’t be annoying or a nuisance when it came time to breastfeed. By knowing what was supposed to happen we could be helpful and courteous. There were even a couple of roles for us to do blocking of the baby’s hand when the mother is trying to get the baby to root because they might stick their thumb into their mouth before the breast gets shoved into it. The issue is that babies when they are first born have no clue what they are doing, why they are in this world, or how to feed. They mainly just want to check everything out visually and try to do what they were doing in the womb, which was sucking on their thumbs. As a father we can prevent this during breastfeeding.
The next segment of the class was a breastfeeding supplies Tupperware party where we got to see a demo, not on a real lactating breast, of how the breast pumps work. The first thing offered as the easiest solution was to just squeeze and extract milk into a cup but that was quickly dismissed as something nobody ever does today. The general demoed products were bags of milk that are collected through the Madela Pump in Style breast pump. It is apparently much more expensive to buy the breast pump through Babies R Us because they mark it up by ~$180 to $390 while there is some association of nursing mothers that sells it for about $209 but can’t list the price because the corporation threatened to crush them like a bug. It was fun to hand around the various inter or non-compatible pumps, bags, bottles, and breast pads and try to screw them into each other or check the suction.
Finally after all of this plastic ware and build-up we got to watch the movie. The movie was the same as what we had been talking about except that it showed real breasts and real babies. It wasn’t very stimulating since milk and bubbles were coming out of the real breasts and there were babies attached to them. I don’t think I learned anything new from the video but I was glad to have seen it.
