Delta: YOU SUCK

Recently, one of my fellow natural parenting group mamas from Fayetteville had a horrendous experience on a Delta flight from Indiana back to NC. I'll post her story:

"I just got back last night from a small trip to see family in Indiana. I'd like to share what happened on the plane coming home. I boarded with my 8 month old, Nash and my husband. We waited until everyone was on until boarding so Nash woul...d spend less time on the plane. As soon as we got on he wanted to nurse and started fussing. I, like i always do, obliged and as discreetly as possible began nursing while my husband stowed away our carry-on(i was by the window and Nash was on my right side, not that it makes a difference). The stewardess then walked up and loudly told me i needed to cover up. I was shocked because i breastfeed on demand anywhere and everywhere and no one has ever said anything about it. I told her i would but i also told her that her telling me to do it was illegal. she said "no its not". I said "yes, actually it is" and my husband concurred. She then turned around towards the front of the cabin and loudly declares "This lady back here is trying to tell me its illegal for telling her to cover her NIPPLE while breastfeeding." At this point i'm shaking. i am extremely shy and non-confrontational. but i do know my rights. My husband quickly pulled up the law on his iphone and when she came back he offered to show her. She told us that Delta makes the rules and she would not look at the phone. She told me there is something called modesty! I went on a small tangent about how breastfeeding is natural, the healthiest thing for baby, and most of all NORMAL. She then said if we wanted to make it an issue we did not need to stay on the plane. We had not taken off yet and my hubby and i did not want to be kicked off so we let it go for then. During the flight she brought a packet of paper to the passengers behind us and we heard whispers and assume she was asking them to fill out a witness report of the incident. After the flight we got her ID number and name and will be filing our own claim against her. I was just shocked that no other mamas on the plane offered any help or even turned in our direction. :( Sorry this is so long i just still shake when describing what happened. I'm ashamed to say I was brought to tears after she walked away just from the embarrassment and lack of support from other women around me. She told us she had been doing this job for 8 years and it just makes me wonder how many other new mamas did she shame for breastfeeding their babies?"

To me, this is completely unacceptable. The flight attendant not only told her to cover herself, but proceeded to announce to the whole flight what the breastfeeding mama was doing as well as demean her in public. The attendant even went as far as to make comments that alluded that the attendant could have them taken off the plane. To me, demeaning a passenger and publically announcing whatever it is they are doing that you don't approve of is NEVER appropriate, much less for breastfeeding, which is a law protected act in many states, as well as the most natural way to feed a baby.

I'm not sure if delta understands the importance of breastfeeding a baby and the fact that nipples, in fact, do NOT show during feeding, but I think it's time that they educate their attendants on how they should speak to breastfeeding mamas, which is NOT AT ALL.

Apparently, this isn't even the first time Delta has treated a breastfeeding mama harshly.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15720339/ns/travel-news/t/woman-kicked-plane-breast-feeding-baby/#.TklOYmHU7D4 

That is a story from 2006 where mama was kicked off the plane.

Because of the way my breastfeeding friends have been treated, I will not ever be a patron of Delta again and I will see to it that my friends and family are not as well.

This is deplorable and should not be tolerated.

If you're reading this, do not fly Delta until they make serious changes to their policies (or lack of policies) for breastfed moms and babies!

I threw away THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS!

...no, seriously. I threw it away. At least that's essentially what I did the first six weeks of Matthew's life. Let me explain...

The entire time I was pregnant, I said that I would *never* cloth diaper. When Matthew was 4 weeks old, I still said I would *never* cloth diaper. My Mimi taught me one thing about the word *never*...and that was to never say it.

At about six weeks, Thomas and I totaled up all of our diaper costs.

Well, wait a minute. Let me backtrack a bit. When Matthew came home from the hospital, he came home using Pampers Swaddlers. They left him with not just a rash, but a terrible blistering between his little cheeks. We switched diapers several times. We tried Swaddlers Sensitive (same blistering), Target brand (absorbency=not worth junk AND it was blowout central for us), Huggies little snugglers (less blistering, extreme redness), then finally switched to a diaper my sister recommended, the Huggies Pure and Natural. This is just about the least cost effective diaper you can purchase (at least 10 dollars for 36 newborns), but it worked for us. Matthew had a bit more redness than most babies with the P&N, but it was a vast improvement from blisters.

Okay, so back to the story. At six weeks, we totaled up our costs. We were at a whopping 300.00 of diapers that we had given away, not been able to use, thrown away due to crappy quality, or best case scenario used for 2 hours max and then thrown away. We were literally having our son poop on our money. Since switching to one income, I've been looking to save money wherever I can, so after talking to my husband and at least getting him to neutral territory on cloth diapering, I dove into researching.

I was under the impression that cloth diapering was all prefolds and safety pins. Not the case. Did you know that cloth diapering can essentially be the same as disposable diapering? Want to know the difference? You don't throw your money away at the end of the day. I had no idea the options with cloth were so vast. I enlisted the expertise of a few moms I know that have chosen the cloth route for their little ones and then went about buying.

In the first few days, I only had the five diapers that I went to Sweetbottoms Boutique (our local cloth diapering store) and bought. I ended up doing cloth about 1/2 the time and noticed an extreme difference in little M's bottom. The redness was clearing up!!

Three weeks later, I've upped my stock just a bit and while I do wash every day currently, I use at most 1-2 disposables a day and sometimes none at all.

My current stock is:

2 Rumparooz, 4 goGreen, 1 Kawaii, 2 Sunbaby, 1 Rocky Mountain, 1 Wahmies, 6 cotton prefolds for added absorbency

I think that's all the diapers I have right now. They're all pocket diapers, which are SO close to disposable diapering that I've noticed very little difference in my daily routine. Since switching, we've only used about 40 diapers in three weeks and that is including 2 full days of disposable diapering this past week while my husband was having surgery. I'm also expecting a shipment of 12 Sunbaby diapers in the coming weeks which will help immensely.

We've not noticed the savings in our account yet as I'm still trying to build up my stash and figure out what I like. Total costs to date: 250.00 and once my Sunbaby order comes, I'll have enough diapers to do laundry every other day. I could stop buying for 2.5 months and would have broken even with what I would have spent on disposables.

The amazing part of cloth diapering is once it's bought, it's a permanent part of your baby "stuff" collection. With some of the cheaper diapers (5-6 dollars), even if you only get 2 or so months use out of them, they've more than paid for themselves compared to disposables. BONUS: You can use the same cloth diapers for all of your kids, so if you keep your diapers in good condition, diapering baby number 2 can be nearly cost free.

In the coming blogs, I'm going to review the diapers that I've bought so far and some new diapers I'm going to try out. I think my next purchase will be some larger prefolds and a couple of covers. I know, I know...that's what turned me off to cloth in the beginning, but I actually really enjoy it and want to try all types of diapers!

For now, I'll leave you with a picture of little M in one of his diapers!

In light of World Breastfeeding Week, I think it's appropriate to share my own breastfeeding story. Throughout childhood, I cannot remember seeing a single person breastfeed. In fact, including my nursing clinicals and preceptorship on a labor and delivery unit, I can only count on my hands how many moms I've seen breastfeed in my life. Honestly, the first person I'd seen do it outside of the first week of life and the setting of a hospital was my sister, Emily--so I'm not sure why I thought it would come "naturally" to me... and it didn't!

I took the breastfeeding class. My birthing class touched on breastfeeding. The midwife asked me at every appointment if I would breastfeed. I thought Matthew would come out, plop happily on my boob, and suck away. Yeah...right. Matthew plopped alright--right out onto the bed without so much as a nurse to catch him. Because of that "uncontrolled" delivery, I was allowed to see him for all of 2 seconds before he was taken to be examined. I'm not sure how that was a reason he needed to be taken immediately, but it was. I was left with no skin to skin for an hour and there was definitely no magic moment where his little mouth came to the breast like a magnet comes together. I felt cheated! So, here we were in the early morning of a Saturday. The L/D nurse said there was no point in trying to feed him because just-borns aren't hungry. The baby nurse literally *yelled* at me for not eating, drinking, and having him at the breast endlessly until he did latch. There would be no lactation consultant until Monday.

Saturday and Sunday were trying to say the least. Everyone had a differing opinion on how to feed him and nobody truly helped. They would come in and shove his mouth at my breast, then leave. Matthew was becoming more and more yellow and finally by Sunday around 1 AM, he was to the point that he cried all night and I cried with him. It was terrible. My roommate (yes, the hospital Matthew was born in pairs 2 moms with 2 new babies together) even came over to me the next morning and said, " I heard you crying and just wanted to come over an hug you. It gets better, I promise."

Monday morning came. We FINALLY had a helpful nurse. She helped me to express some colostrum and syringe feed Matthew. Also, we had a meeting with the lactation consultant at the hospital. She is one of two LC in a hospital that is set to break it's own record of births this year. Her time was limited to say the least. In our 30 minute meeting, Matthew would alternate between screaming and being super lethargic, but would never latch on. The LC tried sugar water, then a nipple shield, and finally a feeding tube and syringe. I bought a 260 dollar pump (that I hardly use now) and pumped milk to use the feeding tube in various and impossible to do ways. About an hour after our meeting, we were discharged.

That first night home was terrible. Because Matthew was jaundiced, he had to eat every 2 hours to get his bilirubin levels down. Getting him to eat was an hour and a half process. I would try to feed him for an hour and a half, then spend the remaining 30 minutes crying about the mother failure I was. This went on for 3 nights and finally miracle of all miracles, he took the breast with a nipple shield!!!

My sister and nephew came to my house for a week and my sister being a breastfeeding mom herself was able to help immensely. With her help, I ended up using the nipple shield about only half the time. I was exhausted and even though my sister was trying to help, there wasn't much I could retain at that point. With the nipple shield, my nipples got pinched and it hurt immensely. By the time Matthew was 2 weeks old I was using the nipple shield about once a day, but his latch was still poor.

I went to Boots & Booties, a maternity fair for military moms the day Matthew turned 2 weeks old and God sent me a miracle!! I won a lactation consultant service. I called Stephanie, the LC with Welcome Home Baby Lactation Consulting, the day after I received her services. She came to my house less than two hours after I called. She was the biggest comfort to me. She just sat there and watched and helped through an entire feeding. She stayed about an hour after that just talking to me and answering every question I had, big or small. She helped me find my confidence and lose at least some of my guilt and feelings of failure. Without her, I would not be breastfeeding. That's a bold statement to make, but it's true. Without Stephanie, I would have continued to doubt myself and would have doubted myself right out of breastfeeding. While she didn't have to do much physically (just some minor latch tweaking), what she provided emotionally was more than I can ever thank her for. She allowed me to be able to continue to give my child his most basic need. So, if you're reading this Stephanie--THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Flash forward to almost 8 weeks old: Matthew has eaten pretty much everywhere I go. We nurse in public. We nurse in private. In his sleep. On the couch. In the car. Whenever. Wherever.

If someone asked me about breastfeeding before he was born, I would have said, "oh yeah--easy peasy"!

If someone had asked me about breastfeeding at a week old, I would have said, "I can't do this...I don't know how...I'm a failure" ....that is if they could have understood my statement between tearful sobs.

If someone asked me about breastfeeding today, I would be able to say, "Oh yeah, it's going pretty well", while nursing Matthew, checking my bank balance, eating lunch, and carrying on a conversation with that person!

There were so many times I wanted to give up and there were many times I probably should have given myself a little more slack, but I'm so excited that we are about to hit our 2 month mark. It is only by the grace of God that we are and I can't forget that.