A proud moment

My four-year-old daughter was just tandem nursing her baby dolls. Now that really made me proud. It's an understatement to say I'm a breastfeeding advocate, but even I didn't tandem nurse, or breastfeed two children of different ages at the same time. I was five months pregnant with this little girl when I weaned her sister, who was two years old (24 months) at the time.

It's interesting that my daughter was just doing this. About an hour before that happened I had just discovered a website that advocates formula feeding. I was rather aghast until I located an article on the site that extolled all the benefits of breastfeeding. Even formula feeders promotes breastfeeding! That's wonderful!

The article on this site — which I won't link to since I don't want my blog leading to a site supporting something I don't care for — listed the pros and cons of both breast and bottle feeding. Interestingly, the advantages for breastfeeding outweighed the disadvantages. It lists eight advantages and five disadvantages for breastfeeding. The disadvantages were trivial things like frequent feedings and limiting caffiene intake.

Also very interesting is the fact that the disadvantages of formula-feeding outweighed the advantages, right there on the bottlefeeding website. The article named four advantages for bottlefeeding — things like being able to eat what you want and leave your baby with others, which you can also do while breastfeeding but I don't particularly support much leaving of a small baby with others for extended periods of time either. The disadvantages were significant and were mostly health concerns like the lack of antibodies in artificial milk.

I am so glad that the website advances natural feeding although it is designed to support formula-feeding families.

Of course my daughters don't know all of this but I'm sure they will come to realize it. For now they remember what I did and and pay attention to all my pro-breastfeeding comments in their own little way.

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