Seven surprises about breastfeeding an older baby


I feel privileged to be breasteeding my ten-month-old. It shouldn't be a surprise as it was for the health visitor who visited us a couple of weeks ago. After all breastfeeding, particularly if your baby is under a year, is nothing if not normal. Read more

Wearing an older baby: woven wrap vs soft structured carrier


While I know people who've worn their babies in stretchy wraps all the way into toddlerhood, I packed mine in when Talitha hit six months. Her weight by then made the fabric uncomfortably bunch up around my shoulders and the more mobile she became Read more

The breastfeeding father


I've just had my first Mother's Day and, funnily enough, it's made me think about fathers. Laurence Talitha bought me La Leche League membership. The LLL is an international charity for breastfeeding mothers and I've just begun going to its Bristol branch meetings. The Read more

Don't label my parenting: struggling with "attachment parenting"


I've recently become uncomfortable with the term "attachment parenting". It's tricky because it very much describes what we're trying to do. Though we do have a routine, we watch our baby and not the clock. We refuse to rush her independence. We respond to Read more

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What I learned

Making a treasure basket

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Adele Jarrett-Kerr Posted in Play | 7 Comments

OR Finding the time to write a blog post…

I noticed at a La Leche League meeting this morning that Talitha was particularly taken with looking inside the baskets on the floor and taking things out of them. So, I thought it was about time we made a treasure basket.

The idea came from Margaret Atieh’s article in Juno’s Winter 2011 edition. The idea is to fill the basket with safe objects from around your house and allow the baby to explore it. It’s both fun and a learning tool.

First, I emptied all the rubbish out of a basket. This included endless “New Baby” cards, the odd bank statement and some leaflets I was given about what her newborn poo should be doing. Better to put new toys in here than end up cleaning bits of card and paper out of her nappies, I thought.

Then I asked Talitha what we should put in it. She seemed to think bananas and my laptop would do the trick. I felt she was not taking the exercise altogether seriously.
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What’s the best bottle for a breastfed baby?

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Adele Jarrett-Kerr Posted in Breastfeeding, What I learned | Leave a comment

Back when I’d started supplementing Talitha’s feeds, first with expressed breast milk then with formula as well, I was hesitant about introducing a bottle.

But because I was expressing like mad, holding a baby who wouldn’t be put down and frankly needed something to not be such hard work, the bottle came in.

I tweeted, asking around for the best bottle for a breastfed baby and a few people gave some good suggestions. There’s nothing like experience to give you an idea on these things though.

So here’s my rundown on all the bottles we tried, should you find yourself in a similar position. Or not – choosing a good bottle is obviously important for bottle fed babies too!

If you’re a bottle connoisseur yourself, please share your views either on these bottles or others you’ve tried.


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Travel with baby Part One: Preparing to fly

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Adele Jarrett-Kerr Posted in What I learned | 18 Comments

Just when I’ve sort of started getting the hang of keeping a tiny human fed, clean, entertained and relatively rested on a daily basis, the time has come to do it all on a transatlantic flight. God help me. I mean it.

This Thursday, I am taking my five-and-a-half-month-old baby and a pared back selection of our belongings on a journey from London Gatwick to Piarco Trinidad.

Since I wanted to make the most of being on “maternity leave” by visiting Trinidad for a month, I will be conducting this feat sans husband.

So, with gritted teeth and a deep breath, I’m giving it my best attempt to being something that does not come naturally to me: organised.

I’ve broken the planning down into the essential categories. If you’ve traveled by airplane with a baby, I’d love it if you threw your two-pence in.

Feeding…
Although Talitha is mostly breastfed, I still need to top up with a couple of ounces here and there of either expressed breast milk or formula so I needed to think this one through. The sources I read online and a couple of people I spoke to had differing opinions about whether you’re allowed to take liquids used for infant feeding through security.

I thought I’d clear this conundrum with Virgin Atlantic. They say I can either take 100ml of breast milk or formula aboard or bring powder and the crew will provide the hot water. I’m still unclear whether this just refers to security but it hardly matters – taking cartons wouldn’t be practical for us since I only need two ounces at a time. So, I can exhale, that bit’s settled.

But there’s another aspect of feeding that I haven’t worked out yet. I’m envisioning Talitha popping off, letting my giant boob splay on to the embarrassed business man sitting next to me, no warning given. With a baby who (quite rightly) refuses to have her head covered and melons that need holding, I’ve still not worked out a way that lets me feed efficiently while discreetly. I’m locked into lactivism by default. So, sorry in advance, fictional business man.
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Bottle feeding with love

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Adele Jarrett-Kerr Posted in Breastfeeding, What I learned | 17 Comments

For all my determination to feed from the breast as much as possible, I’ve kicked it in with the supplemental nursing system. I’ll use it for the occasional feed but I’m mostly formula feeding* now and bottles have simply proven less stressful.

I’ll go into all the wherefore’s in another post for those interested in knowing more about life with an SNS. I still maintain it’s brilliant but have made the personal decision to mainly bottle feed.

It’s taken a long time but I’ve finally made my peace with the bottle, mostly anyway. A lot of this has come from realising that losing some of breastfeeding’s nutritional value doesn’t have to mean losing the bonding involved with it too. So, I’m taking some conscious steps to bottle feed with love.


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Five things I’d do if I had a newborn again

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Adele Jarrett-Kerr Posted in Baby wearing, Breastfeeding, What I learned | 21 Comments

At almost sixteen weeks it finally seems official that Talitha is not a newborn. She’s passed the eleven-pound mark on most newborn disposable nappies and grown too long for all her 0-3 months’ clothing. Those first twelve weeks, that fourth trimester, was such brief time and yet living it took yonks.

Looking back with the sagely wisdom of one with a slightly less young baby, I’ve been thinking about what I’d change if I could have a do-over of the newborn thing. These aren’t regrets so much as a gentle interrogation of the experience for next time.

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The real boob tube: Learning to feed my baby with an SNS

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Adele Jarrett-Kerr Posted in Breastfeeding, What I learned | 30 Comments

Had someone told me I’d be pouring milk into a container, hanging it around my neck and taping the tubes attached to it to my breasts I’d not have believed it. I’d tell them: “Bring on the bottle, mate.”

I couldn’t have known how important breastfeeding would be to me until it was threatened. It took time to accept that Talitha needed supplementary milk and that, realistically, some of it would have to be formula.

When it became clear that almost every feed needed a top-up, at least for the time being, I both resented and was grateful for the bottle.

Despite having her tongue-tie corrected, Talitha still has a poor suck. She has to be at just the right angle and there needs to be just the right pressure in the breast or she gets hardly anything. She gets tired too soon.

Though the bottle was helping her gather the energy to make a real go of things, I was beginning to worry that the frequency with which we were using it was making her prefer the ease of its flow to the “hard work” of the breast.
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