Goidellick Designs is a tiny family run business. We run our business from our remote farm cottage in the Highlands of Scotland.

We have three children who are educated at home. We decided to start up our own business to allow us to be at home with the children. We wanted this business to reflect our values and opinions. We are enthusiastic about breastfeeding, home education and environmental issues. Through these interests we came up with our range of shirts and bags.
We’re now running a busy household full of children and cats and trying to promote our business too.

http://www.goidellick.toucansurf.com/goidellickdesigns/gd_bm_shirts.htm

Dear Aunty Lactivist,

Aunty Lactivist is all of us so if you can help the person who wrote the question, if you have links to research, have read anything useful or have opinions you want to share on the matter please use this space.

Lisa

I’m really pleased that Lactivist t-shirts are now available in Norway! The shop Ammebutikken stocks them, along side all sorts of interesting looking things.

Here is the site translated through google, for those of you, who like me cannot read Norwegian!

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=no&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ammebutikken.no%2F

I would like to start up Aunty Lactivist and ask Lactivist readers to become agony aunts and help people with breastfeeding problems.

The idea is that we take one problem, say ‘my baby won’t sleep through the night and people say formula will help’ then Lactivist readers can comment and try to help. I know for a fact that some of you are Breastfeeding Peer Supporters and Lactation Consultants so we could theoretically have a good mixture of professional help and personal experience.

What do you think?

If you have a problem you’d like discussed you can email me at moomum@lactivist.co.uk and I can post it anon for you.

Lisa

• The majority of women undergo some breast changes during pregnancy.  These changes include breast enlargement, increased blood flow, the development of small lumps (‘Montgomery’s tubercles’) on the areola.  These changes happen so as to prepare the breasts for breastfeeding a baby after birth.

• Many women put on weight during pregnancy and additional fat stores are laid down in the breasts.  This adds to their increase in size.  Both of these changes will result in a stretching of the skin, and stretch marks may appear.

• In the days and hours following birth, the breasts begin to make milk.  This will happen whether you intend to breastfeed or not.  A few days after birth the milk (usually) ‘comes in’ and many women experience some engorgement.  Their breasts become full and the skin may feel tight and stretched, (breastfeeding is a great treatment for this).  ;)

• If you don’t breastfeed, the breasts gradually stop producing milk and the engorgement subsides on it’s own as the body realises no milk is required.  The milk-making machinery then shrinks back in a process called ‘breast involution’.  The skin (which has been stretched as explained above) may or may not ‘snap back’ into shape. 

• The additional weight gain/ breast enlargement caused by pregnancy may have also stretched the ligaments supporting the breast.

• If a woman smokes, this can affect the ability of her skin to recover from changes (such as those brought on by pregnancy). This is because smoking reduces the levels of collagen and elastin in the body.

• If a woman continues to breastfeed her breast involution will be delayed and will take place when the child weans. 

• Age matters – the older we get, the less collagen and elastin we naturally have in our skin (hence wrinkles!), and so with age everyone sags a bit.  It’s a fact of life.

• The number of pregnancies you’ve had can also contribute to breast sagging. The associated weight gain/ weight loss and breast enlargement/ breast involution is to blame. Basically, the more pregnancies you have the more you’re putting your body through & the harder it will find it to recover.

• The bigger your breasts are anyway, the more likely they are to head south at some point.  This is because of gravity and the weight of the breast pulling on the supporting ligaments.

• There is evidence to show that wearing a bra actually weakens the ligaments supporting the breast (as they are not being used) and therefore contributes to breast ptosis. 

•  If you lose a lot of weight, your skin may struggle to shrink back once the fat has gone – this can leave your breasts looking ‘empty’. Again, the supporting ligaments may have been stretched in the past.

• Breastfeeding has not been found to be a cause of breast-ptosis.

Here’s the science bit:
*http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19083576
*http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1651-2227.2004.tb02935.x/abstract

Please would you let me know what browser you are using, I am trying to fix it. Thank you!

Lisa

The lovely people from Family Friendly Working have a draw for a Boppy breastfeeding pillow that ends today at 2.45.

All you have to do is comment on the page here:

http://www.familyfriendlyworking.co.uk/2010/08/27/win-a-boppy-breastfeeding-pillow/

Should Breastfeeding Be Taught In Elementary School?

From http://blogs.babble.com/being-pregnant/2010/09/07/should-breastfeeding-be-taught-in-elementary-school/

Here’s how it should go: As a part of the basic biology curriculum, children are taught about breastfeeding. How the milk comes in. What’s in it. How it helps the baby.  Students see pictures of women of multiple ethnicities breastfeeding. There’s a homework assignment and several questions on a test. Twenty or thirty years later these kids, now fully grown new parents, may not even remember Ms. Morris’ biology class, but there might just be one less mental hurdle to breastfeeding.

The website Nursing Freedom ran a piece last week called, “Why Children Should Witness Breastfeeding in Public.” Here’s a line I liked:

“We need to make nursing in public so boring, so quotidian, that it garners no more of a glance or second thought than seeing someone drinking a coffee or hugging a friend in public.”

I read this on Friday and over the weekend kept thinking about public breastfeeding. Usually this issue comes up when some ignorant manager of a mediocre eatery stupidly asks a nursing mother  to cover up and then has to endure all kinds of grief, including being read to from state laws concerning breastfeeding in public and/or local press coverage of a “nurse in” in which a posse of breastfeeders show up and breastfeed in front of or inside the establishment.

I support a woman’s choice to breastfeed in public. If breastfeeding is kept out of sight, no one sees it. No one sees it and it’s mysterious. It’s mysterious and people feel weird about breastfeeding. And on the feedback loop goes. More exposure would make the sight of breastfeeding “boring.” Or normal.

But then I saw a new mom in the park nursing under a kind of nursing tent/cover-all. It was a pretty cool-looking gizmo and propped up so that the baby could nurse privately without a blanket literally plastered over his or her face. I thought about the feedback loop and wondered whether this mother should just toss this fancy tent aside to help the rest of us get over our baggage.

Then I thought back to when I first had my baby.

I was quite engorged and it wasn’t the hot kind of engorged, the fake boob kind. It was the, Wow, how’s your back doing? kind. I won’t tell you the cup size, but let’s just say many people I do tell had no idea that size even existed. My over-supply meant that milk would often squirt out all over the minute I started unfastening things. The idea of doing all of this in public– as much as I supported the idea in theory– was hard.

After a few months when I’d gotten it all down, I nursed at friends’ houses, in restaurants and parks discreetly and without much fuss or a blanket. But at first I felt like this was all nobody’s business. I also felt a little cranky about the situation. Why do I have to change attitudes about public breastfeeding??  It’s hard enough learning all these new things. Do I have to change public opinion at the same time?

This is how I came to the breastfeeding in school concept. If Bill Maher and others had seen breastfeeding when they were kids, and been taught that it’s a normal part of life, like digesting or breathing, maybe there wouldn’t be so many snickers. Get to the kids before they get to the giggling stage– teaching teens about breastfeeding is also a great idea but by then too much squeamishness has settled in. The sooner the better.

“I am a nearly 37 year old mum with two children (Connor nearly 4 and Katie nearly 2). I gave up teaching in a primary school (which I loved) so I could look after my son and haven’t looked back. Although money is tight, my husband and I are content with our lifestyle choice which is just as well as we are going to home educate our littlies and so won’t be bringing in much money any time soon.

I like being creative, when I get the time, and I am not looking after children, cats, dogs or chickens. I enjoy cooking/baking, making jams and chutneys, making ring slings and clothes, making cards and my latest Sok Doodes. Sok Doodes were sock dolls that I made for my children but after I put photos on Facebook, I had lots of friends and family asking me to make them all kinds of creatures. My midwife loved them and asked if I could make a breastfeeding doll and I accepted the challenge as it was something that I had wondered about in the past myself and so Boobee Mamma was born!

As I posted the orginal photos on Facebook, a friend suggested I make a toddler as well as a baby so she could be a tandem feeding doll. Already she has created a lot of discussion at a family party and if I don’t get the opportunity to feed my daughter in my efforts to normalise breastfeeding (which to be honest, happen fairly regularly )  then at least I have something else to help the cause!

Boobee Mammas can be found on Facebook as well as my website www.lil-treasure.co.uk. If anybody wants to buy a Boobee Mamma, they can contact me through Facebook or email: boobeemamma@littleave.freeserve.co.uk

Tracey”

The Bundle Jungle are pleased to announce that their charity auction in aid of Cheshire and North wales human milk bank is officially open for bids!

Items on offer include:

- Lactivist T-Shirts
- Modern cloth nappies from cheeks and cherries, Issy Bear, Fluff and Stuff and many more.
- Chambers and Beau charm bracelet
- Professional Photoshoot with Penny Wincer (London Area)
- Holden’s Landing Nappy and Knittybugz Wool Collaboration
- Designer maternity clothes
- Designer baby clothes
- SO much more!

All items start at just 99 pence with NO RESERVE. Come on over to The Bundle Jungle pregnancy and parenting forum now, sign up for your FREE account and get bidding! It’s all for a great cause and there are some serious bargains to be had.

Elle
www.TheBundleJungle.com