Toddlers always want to feel in charge of a situation.  But as a parent, I need to be in charge of my toddler.  This tug of war can last for a long time.  When it comes to disciplining, our son seems to listen more to my husband.  Partially due to …

It seems that this summer the issue of breastfeeding featured very prominently in the news, whether it’s the Time magazine cover promoting attachment parenting or Mayor Bloomberg’s voluntary program that hospitals only provide formula to new mothers upon their direct request. In May, when the Time magazine cover of a …

A few weeks ago an infant bottle manufacturer released a couple of statements via Twitter that created quite a stir from men and women alike. An attempt to be of a humorous nature, it revealed a scenario few families are willing to talk about. The offending tweets were geared towards …

I feel very lucky to have had four very positive, and delightfully uneventful, breastfeeding experiences.  I tend to try and stay away from medication in general especially when nursing a little one and as a result have never been well studied on which medications are safe for breastfeeding moms and …

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…(Romans 12:2) I love having divine moments in life that help me to correlate them to a scripture. They are rarely huge epiphanies, yet realized only afterwards during reflection. I recently had one …

This week I spent almost 3 days away from my nursing baby.  Three days with a machine to extract milk to save for the future, keep me comfortable, and keep my supply abundant.  When I finally got home, I was anxious to feed my baby…

Editor’s note: Even though my eldest is now in college, I have vivid memories of being a young mom, attempting to breastfeed my baby, and falling flat on my face. That’s why I am thrilled to welcome new contributor Jaime Buelterman who will join us once per quarter to share …

Have you seen the commercial for the new Huggies diapers?  Where they show the different types of squirming babies?   I have an acrobutt.  She likes to play twister.  In bed.  While nursing. She starts out nursing.  Then she gets restless and starts inching her little butt in the air. …

A few months ago, I was e-commiserating with a friend about the physical challenges of having children.   We were neighbors in the hospital as she delivered her seventh on the same day my fifth was born.  Obviously, neither of us were surprised with the toll childbirth, sleepless nights, and nursing …

The outside world seems to put expectations upon us without care of the consequences.  These expectations may be based on ones they have of themselves, or ones they think we should be following.  Priorities are the true foundation of expectations.  Where our vocation lies is where our heart is.  My …

My 3-year-old’s pre-school teacher pulled me aside one day after school.  My daughter and a friend had been putting dolls in their dresses, pretending to be pregnant, then pulling the dolls out from between their legs, and then pretending to breastfeed.  “We weren’t sure what to do!” the perplexed teacher …

I was taught in medical school never to leave a newborn delivery without discussing birth control with the new mother.  The exhausted, delighted mothers and smiling fathers would always give the physician a puzzled look when asked, minutes after delivery, what their birth control plans were.  It seemed like a …

Once upon a time, our bedroom was a little bit famous, although admittedly not quite as well-known as the Three Bears’ chambers. It all started when our son Benedict, now 23, was still an infant, and his sister Grace was 17 months old. I was involved at the time in …

A commenter, Beck, at my recent breastfeeding and the La Leche League post, prompted me to write a long comment about breastfeeding and pumping that I decided to turn into a new post of its own.  Her mention of pumping got me thinking that I should share my experience with …

“In the mid 50’s only about 20% of U.S. babies were breast-fed.  Nursing rates had dropped sharply after WWII with the wider availability of formula.” It’s crazy to think about how unpopular breastfeeding was for a big chunk of the 1900’s.  My Mom didn’t nurse any of her babies, few …

I officially received the title of “Dairy Queen” in 1999 when a friend of mine fed a stray kitten in the Hawaiian tropics with my breast milk.    Oh my goodness that sounds so funny.  Let me explain.  I had a friend whose child had failure to thrive.  I asked …

In his book about Mother Teresa, Brian Kolodiejchuk quotes the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta that the goal of all her work is to “quench God’s thirst for love and for souls.” 1 Often in the correspondence leading up to the founding of her order, Mother Teresa wrote of the little …

Fifty years ago, when the well known mother-to-mother-support organization La Leche League (LLL) was started (by seven Catholic women!), breastfeeding was not only out of fashion – it was nearly extinct! At that time, more than 80% of mothers bottle-fed their newborns using formula (so-called because it had to be …

So I was pumping today at work (that’s breastmilk for the uninitiated), and I had a thought.  “I was made for this.”  I had just gone and pumped because I felt a let-down.  Again, for the uninitiated, a “let-down” is the tingling/pins-and-needles feeling that women get when their milk comes …

In my BC (“before children”) days when I was still a full-time working girl, I was on the staff of a regional women’s publication that was decidedly left-leaning. When my boss (whom I also considered a friend) asked me to do a write-up on a pro-choice event, I declined, explaining …