Babywearing on a hike
Music and dance
Play with your baby – does this look like wrestling to you?
Make faces with baby
Snuggle with nursling
Read to your nursling
Coaches with children
Steady uncertain legs
Comfort your nursling
Keep your nursling warm
To see coaches bonding with younger nurslings, visit Wordless Wednesday over at Sweet Pea Births
As we prepare to take one more trip before we settle back into our homeschool year, I thought I would share some of the things we do to prepare to travel with our children, specifically our youngest. One of the greatest conveniences of breastfeeding is that your milk is always available, in the right quantity and at the right temperature. We have enjoyed being very mobile with our little ones.
Here are some things we have learned along the way:
If your nursling was into a rhythm, prepare it to change. Whether you are changing time zones, or changing the people coming into your circle, or maybe it’s simply a change in the place where you are sleeping, nurslings are usually a little thrown off from their patterns. Having specific routines in place may help ease their transition through your trip. Wherever a routine fits into your schedule, keep it: morning routine, nap routine, bedtime routine. Usually a family has a consistent way of doing things somewhere in their day if they think about it. Figure out where yours is and keep it consistent when you are away from home. Keeping it consistent may ease your baby back into their other patterns once they settle in.
Also prepare yourself to be flexible: you may not be able to get back to your sleep space right on time for your nursling’s nap. Can baby sleep in the car as you drive, sleep in a carrier, sleep in a stroller? Have a back-up plan just in case so that you can enjoy your trip and the new sights without being tied to your nursling’s schedule which they may not be keeping anyway.
Your nursling may want to nurse more. This goes back to your baby’s rhythm. Even the slightest change in their day may send your baby back to the breast more often at home. Their need to comfort nurse may be heightened in your new surroundings. Knowing this, plan ahead if you think frequent nursing is going to be uncomfortable in your vacation/trip space. Call your hosts ahead of time and feel out their comfort level with breastfeeding (if they are not, ask them to think about where you can nurse when you are visiting them), search out family-friendly venues, plan your wardrobe according to ease of nursing. You can mix fashion and functionality…in fact, one of my favorite lines is Momzelle, which happens to be on sale today!
Your nursling may be happier next to you. Keeping your baby “on” you may not be feasible through your whole trip. However, if you are comfortable babywearing or have time to get used to it before your trip, that close proximity has been another way we have found to ease our nurslings anxiety when we travel.
Bring some of your favorite foods with you. If your nursling has already started solids, bring some of their favorite snack foods with you. We usually bring along enough for a couple of days of snacking. With the ease of the internet, you may be able to find a store that sells your nurslings favorite foods at your destination. Also remember that “food before one is just for fun”. Friends or family that you are visiting may fret that your baby isn’t eating enough…rest assured that your breastmilk makes all the nutrients your baby needs and they will be getting enough to thrive up until around their first birthday (more HERE).
When you relax and have fun, your nursling will to. Our nurslings are little energy readers – are yours? They know when we are feeling off, and likewise when we are at ease. Do you know how to operate at your best “frequency”? Make sure that you take care of yourself so that you can be at your best when you are on your trip.
What tips would you share with a family traveling with a nursling?
Did you see last week’s tips on handling breastfeeding when you travel in regards to nursing in public and breastfeeding laws? You may want to check that out if you are traveling out of state. Personally, I will be refreshing myself on CA laws this week 🙂
Great news!! There is a new support group in the Phoenix, Arizona area for parents who want to learn more about and practice Attachment Parenting.
I had the pleasure of attending the first meeting yesterday. It was so great to be in a room with 6 other families who are seeking to nurture their families the AP way. Dr. Sears is credited for coining the term “Attachment Parenting” and with bringing awareness to it in his book, The Attachment Parenting Book. Here is his explanation of what it is from his website, www.askdrsears.com:
Attachment parenting is a style of caring for your infant that brings out the best in the baby and the best in the parents. Attachment parenting implies first opening your mind and heart to the individual needs of your baby, and eventually you will develop the wisdom on how to make on-the-spot decisions on what works best for both you and your baby.
A close attachment after birth and beyond allows the natural, biological attachment-promoting behaviors of the infant and the intuitive, biological, caregiving qualities of the mother to come together. Both members of this biological pair get off to the right start at a time when the infant is most needy and the mother is most ready to nurture. Bonding is a series of steps in your lifelong growing together with your child.
http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/attachment-parenting
Amanda Santana is the facilitator for the Phoenix group. She is certified through Attachment Parenting International. Her goal is to start a support group to educate and empower other parents, and to find people who are interested in becoming certified so that there can be co-leaders in place to start more groups throughout the Phoenix area.
The topic of yesterday’s meeting was, “What is Attachment Parenting?” The next few meetings will be devoted to exploring each of the eight principles of AP in more depth. The group will also talk about how to incorporate them into your family life if you think that the principle will work for you.
One of the takeaways from yesterday’s meeting:
4 P’s to help you identify child(ren)’s needs
The other take-away from yesterday that I want to share with you:
The Eight Principles are guidelines.
Amanda emphasized that Attachment Parenting provides guidelines. The Eight Principles are not Hard and Fast Rules. They are ideas that have worked for other families to facilitate peaceful parenting. Your attendance does not mean that you have to accept all eight principles. A family does not have to practice or own any of the principles that do not “fit”, they just have to honor that other families may choose differently.
Amanda also stated that while the goal was to work through the eight principles in the next few meetings, she is open to being flexible. The support group addresses topics as they arise as per the needs of the group. If she is a cluster of getting emails along the same topics, she will bring them up to the group for discussion so that meetings are useful and relevant to those they are attending.
The group will be meeting on the third Thursday of every month at 10:00 am. It is held at the Moxie Midwifery office, 5505 W Chandler Blvd Ste #5, Chandler, AZ 85226. For any questions about Attachment Parenting or the Phoenix support group, you can reach Amanda via email at AZNB.Amanda@gmail.com
HERE are some questions to discuss with your partner whether you are expecting, living with a newborn, or rethinking your parenting style with older children. We worked through these to help clarify what our goals were for our family. As it turns out, a lot of what Attachment Parenting believes are choices that fit for our clan of six. Even if these answers don’t lead you down the path to attachment parenting, having some clarity about your goals as a family may be helpful in guiding you to the choices that are right for your family.
What do you think – have you explored Attachment Parenting? Has it worked for you? Please leave us a comment – it will be moderated and posted.
More about Attachment Parenting:
From Dr. Sears
From Attachment Parenting International:
Disclaimer:
The material included on this site is for informational purposes only.
It is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. The reader should always consult her or his healthcare provider to determine the appropriateness of the information for their own situation. Krystyna and Bruss Bowman, Bowman House, LLC and Cassandra Okamoto accept no liability for the content of this site, or for the consequences of any actions taken on the basis of the information provided.
A day in the life of a family of six…have you ever wondered how all the moving parts work?
Cassandra, our guest blogger, was so excited to hear that we were going to expand our platform because she is a new mama of just over a year. She remembers being a first-time mama in the social media internet age, devouring all the information related to pregnancy and birth. Everything else was just a distraction to her. So here we are, with more information for you when you are ready to explore life beyond the Birth-Day.
We are two working-from-home parents with four children. As of today, our children are 8, 5, 3 and 1 year(s) old. I homeschool, teach Bradley Method® classes, blog and offer 24/7 support to our Bradley™ families. Bruss works at his asset management company from a home office and co-teaches almost every Bradley Method® class with me. We are definitely co-parents in our family’s journey.
For future reference…here are the names I use out on the internet for our children: Puma (8), Night Owl (5), Charger (3), and Otter (1). In real life, their initials form the acronym BABY…a happy coincidence since babies and their births are turning out to be a passion of mine.
We credit a lot of the choices we have made as parents to our time as students of The Bradley Method®. We took the classes with our first two children. We learned about how to have a healthy, low-risk pregnancy. We learned strategies to have an epidural-free natural labor. We learned about breastfeeding and how it is an extension of seeking out the natural processes. We also heard about co-sleeping, babywearing, and circumcision. The information that was shared by our teachers opened our eyes to choices we hadn’t really considered yet – we were so focused on the birth of our baby.
After we had our first child, we wanted to keep following our instincts. It didn’t make sense to put her in the bedroom down the hall when all we wanted to do was hold her and marvel at this miracle of life that we had worked so hard to bring into the world. Although the thought of co-sleeping creeped us out when we first heard about it in class, once she was born, there was no other way. Thus the start of our family bed.
I struggled to breastfeed Puma, so much so that I made Bruss take all the formula samples out of the house. Now I have learned that “No pain, no gain” does not apply to breastfeeding. I have also evolved from thinking I was only ever going to breastfeed a child until they were a year old. Puma and I were not ready to stop nursing when she hit her first birthday. That breastfeeding relationship continued until she self-weaned at 22 months. I am currently nursing Charger and Otter. There will definitely by some posts dedicated to extended breastfeeding as time allows.
I knew that I wanted Puma to be a whole, emotionally intact adult, so I chose to operate from a place of love, not domination. I wanted to honor and respect her as a human being, even if she did not have words yet and she did not look like an adult. Attachment parenting and babywearing have been our choices to reach that goal. These days, I strive to remember her as a tiny infant who just wants to be loved: now she is a very independent 8-year old who gives me attitude and pushes my “crazy” button just because she thinks it’s funny.
We did not really address circumcision until our second pregnancy. Since we had a girl first, we figured the odds were that we better do better homework this time. Although it’s common in the US, we do not have any religious or cultural beliefs that teach circumcision as a precondition to belong to the community. I was not crazy about cutting a child a few days after they were born, but i also figured since I was not the father who was going to be different, that choice should be up to Bruss. We decided to have him watch a circumcision video on nocirc.org. He didn’t even last 10 seconds. So there we are – it was not a choice for our family. The more I learn about it, the more grateful I am for our choice. I won’t write any more about that because there are enough impassioned voices out there…and I have the belief that our boys private parts are just that – private. If they want to blog about it when they are older, that is up to them.
As parents, we continue to use the communication skills we learned in class. We make every effort to honor each other when we speak to each other and our children. We have also used the informed consent questions when our children have had hospital stays. If it fits as the site evolves, we may share those experiences with you, too.
Here are some of the things she and I will be writing about in future posts:
We invite you to share other ideas with us. What do you wonder about when you think about growing your family?