Mommy, can I nursie?

I get this a lot these days from my almost 3 year old with just about perfect language skills, who still loves to nurse. Notice the beautiful grammer in the title question. Should a child who can ask a question this well, still be breastfeeding? Lots of people ask me this (mostly my family, since they are the only ones who get the priviledge of watching me nurse this little guy who is more than half my size) and I usually say, "yes."

I didn't start out my breast feeding life planning to nurse my child until he was three. My mom breastfed five children, and the longest was 20 months. So I was used to children who could walk and talk climbing up into my mom's lap to nurse. With my first child, I knew that I wanted to breast feed. I knew that for me, there was no other option. Then Ben, my first son, just enjoyed it. There was no reason to stop. All the reasons that people give - "He's too big", "He doesn't need that anymore", "You're spoiling him","Don't you want him to grow up?" - they just didn't hold water for me. Now, when I got pregnant with Sam, the current "flat footed feeder," my milk dried up, and there was no reason to continue, since at that point I had become a pacifier (not a pleasant sensation I can assure you, at 20 weeks pregnant).

And Ben was fine. He was 27 months old at the time. We had had a wonderful time breastfeeding (after a difficult first few days) and he seemed to accept that the time had come to stop. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe, if after this new little one is born he asks to nurse again - I may let him. But to my relief, he never asked and I began nursing number two.

So at this point in my life I have been breast feeding or pregnant for almost seven years now, and as we are expecting #3 in March (yea!) this looks to not stop anytime soon.

On the same day that we found out we were pregnant with this new little one, we also got the heart-wrenching news that my mother has breast cancer. As I previously stated, she's had five babies and breast fed for around six and a half years or so (all total) and I just sort of assumed that because of that she wouldn't get breast cancer. Obviously, that was not the case for her, but it did lead me to do some research on my own about breast feeding and breast cancer risk.

What I found was interesting - escpecilly as a Catholic, natural family planning, attachment parenting mom. What's interesting is this - the Church's teaching on contraception leads those Catholic familes who follow NFP to tend to have more kids than the average in this country today - and many of those NFP moms tend to use some means of ecological breastfeeding. And all of these practices actually lower a woman's risk of breast cancer. It does not get rid of those chances, but it does significantly reduce them (around 7% for each year of breastfeeding). And that's good news.

Though as my mom says, the biggest risk factor for getting breast cancer is being a woman. So our risk isn't gone. What it does mean though, is that Catholic teaching on this subject has more than just positive spiritual benefits. In the natural world, doing things God's way protects us from disease. Big surprise, right?

Knowing all this makes it a little easier for me to say "Yes." Yes to the question (yet again) "Mommy, can I nursie?" And yes to the Church when she says, "Do it this way." Not only am I saying yes to the church and to my bigger every day toddler - I'm saying "yes" to God.