About 30 parents and their babies staged a nurse-in in front of an airline counter in Vermont after a woman nursing in public was kicked off an airplane.

Since we all can’t be there, how about sharing some public places where you or your partner has nursed. I’ll start: park bench, Dunn Brothers, in my car and yes, in an airplane.

The AP reported that a New Mexico mom visiting relatives in Vermont was kicked off an airplane after she refused to cover herself with a blanket while breastfeeding her baby.

Many of you have probably stumbled across our blog or linked to us from the startribune.com home page. I just wanted to share how it all came about, from a glimmer in our eyes to fruition. May wrote this article that appeared in Star Tribune Source back in September.

 

Oh Baby It’s Blog Time

A secret locked room. Furtive comings and goings. Muted puffing sounds. For the longest time, we pumped alone.

Three, four, five women — the numbers ebbed and flowed like our milk — sharing a dreary lactation room that contained one (slightly stained) armchair, one side table and a stack of parenting magazines.

When I described it to a colleague, he said it reminded him of a story he wrote about sperm donation — same kind of room, different literature.

Then one woman tacked a makeshift schedule on the wall so we could coordinate pumping time for privacy. Others put up pictures of their babies. One day, I left a pad and pen and invited others to jot down random thoughts on parenthood and life.

My own first scribble — pen on paper! how quaint! — was a cry for help after I had gone back to work and my 4-month-old refused to take a bottle. My little Maya, the Indian iteration of which means Divine Force, showed her displeasure with a daytime hunger strike that lasted a week.

Miserable and missing my baby, I was afraid to call home for fear I’d hear the Divine Force screaming in the background.

My pumpmates consoled me by leaving web links on the pad directing me to helpful sites, or confessing to challenges of their own. Sleep deprivation. The pressures to breast-feed. One woman wrote a sweet goodbye letter to us. Her new baby made her realize she no longer wanted to spend two hours on the road every day. She was taking a job closer to home.

And so, a solitary pursuit became a little less solitary. Suddenly, it didn’t seem such a drag to troop upstairs to the secret fourth-floor pump room. There usually was something new to read and reflect on, a respite from the harried workday.

One mother, Kay Krhin, suggested we start a blog. If our small group were any indication, surely others were also bursting to share!

Luckily, our bosses at the Star Tribune agreed. The two of us — May and Kay — will write most of it, but its survival depends on you new dads and moms. We’re hoping you’ll rant or rave, join conversations and start new ones, tell us why we’re not crazy or why we are, and maybe even be a guest blogger now and then.

Is there anything as enriching as a new baby and as isolating at the same time?

Kay’s baby, Ben, is now 7 months old. She remembers when her husband went back to work, out-of-town relatives left and friends stopped bearing hot-dishes.

While Ben napped, she spent hours online, scouring parenting websites and reading message boards. But while there was a lot of stuff out there, she couldn’t find much that was local.

“I wanted to know things like, “Where can I walk indoors with my baby on a snowy day?” “What restaurants don’t look down their noses at strollers?” “Are there nearby mommy-baby yoga classes?”  “Where are the local bargains for baby gear?”

So come on. Log on and tell us.

The August cover of babytalk magazine was a riot of orbs: baby’s round head and round cheeks, and oh, the very round, very prominent boob to which baby’s mouth was firmly latched.

I have to say, I thought nothing of the picture when I saw it three months ago. Turns out quite a few others did. The magazine got 8,500 letters to the editor, about 99 percent congratulatory. Many thanked the magazine for running what some still see as a taboo image. One grateful reader confessed she spent a lot of time holed up in her apartment because disapproving looks in public often made her feel “breastfeeding is a crime.” But a few readers, well….here are three excerpts from less enraptured readers, as published in the November issue.

“Eww, eww, eww!!”

“I was shocked to see this pornography in my mailbox and would like to see this kind of picture usage discontinued.”

“Anyone doing it in public should be arrested for indecent exposure. Why can’t they put in bottles or something?”

An Associated Press story in July about the brouhaha quoted a Texan mother who said she shredded the cover so her 13-year-old son wouldn’t see it. The article also taught me a new word - “lactivist,” refering to mothers who feel they have the right to whip it out anywhere and anytime to feed a baby.

Lactivist? Sounds like common sense to me.

What do you think?

Thought that would get your attention.

If you thought breast milk was the perfect food, think again. Apparently a company in California has found a way to improve on perfection by standardizing calories and nutrients in each ounce and, wait for it, selling the re-engineered breast milk for $26 to $43 an ounce. The University of Minnesota’s medical center is a supplier and gets $2 for every ounce collected. And the mothers who produce the milk? Nothing. Maura Lerner writes about this in today’s Strib.

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