Apr 30 2013
By Carla Naumburg at 4:01 pm
A new invention recently developed by an Israeli start-up can measure the amount of milk in your breast before and after you nurse your child, thereby telling you how much milk your baby is getting.
I would have given my left arm (but probably not my left boob) for something like this when I was nursing my first daughter. Breastfeeding was a struggle from the beginning, and thanks to the complete lack of Plexiglas windows on the side of either of my boobs, I had no idea if it was because I wasn’t producing enough or my daughter wasn’t sucking enough, or something else all together. My memories of nursing her over nine months consist primarily of checklists, timers, breast pumps, and on one particularly memorable occasion, an array of no fewer than 24 pills that I would take over the course of the day, all in the service of feeding my baby. Read the rest of this entry →
Oct 29 2012
By Tamar Fox at 8:39 pm
All the parenting news you probably didn’t have time to read this week.
Here’s a yucky but important topic: vaginal tears that result from vaginal childbirth. Turns out they may be a lot more widespread than most doctors know or admit, and can cause fecal matter through the vagina, flatus incontinence, and pain. Learn more so you can talk about it with your doctor ahead of time. (Motherlode)
Pretty much everyone agrees that middle school is the worst. But no one is really trying to make it better. Now researchers are discovering that helping middle schoolers have a better time predicts whether or not they’ll stay in school, and how successful they’ll be. (Slate)
As a mom you’re probably taking pictures of your kids and family all the time. But how often do you get in front of the camera yourself? One mom reminds us that someday when we’re gone our kids will want pictures of us, and we shouldn’t be erasing ourselves from our family’s photographic history. (Huffington Post)
A mom in Texas made it to the Guinness book of world records for donating a whopping 87 gallons of breast milk to her local breast milk bank. (NY Daily News)
Oct 10 2012
By Laura Ben-David at 4:43 pm
It all started with a note taped to a refrigerator. Not just any fridge; this was the staff refrigerator in a hospital maternity ward in Jerusalem. The nurse, who discovered the note, was placing her pumped breast milk therein when she noticed it. “To Whom It May Concern,” read the politely worded note with a less than polite message, “Please do not store breast milk in this refrigerator. The Staff.”
Back just a few days from her maternity leave, as the only nursing mother on staff, the letter may as well have been addressed to her. Shocked, she complained up the chain of command all the way to upper management. She was told that each ward is its own democracy and can decide independently if it wants to allow breast milk to be placed in its own staff refrigerators. Unable to be a part of a “democracy” that could make such decisions, the nurse resigned. Read the rest of this entry →
