IQ 89 must be the evaporated milk (funny story part 4)

The Topic of breast feeding has been a controversial one in our house. My wife has had two children from a previous marriage. Both were formula fed and i9n the words of Anna “they are just fine” No one in my wife’s family has ever breast fed. In my family it is not an option as my wife learned. During a picnic, the day after our wedding, the topic of a future grandchild came up. My sister asked Anna if she planned to breast feed. Anna asked if there was any real benefits, to which my mother (after a few glasses of wine) announced to my wife, who she had met only 5 days earlier, “Scott and his brother are smart because I breast fed them, Amy (my sister) is stupid because I gave her evaporated milk”. (None of which is true, Amy is very intelligent) My new in-law’s and the 50 or so guests thought that this was the highlight of the party. What it did was plant the seed to which I would continue to feed.

I started to leave breast feeding pamphlets around the house for Anna to find. I would cite facts and information that I had learned about breast feeding( I had chosen breast feeding as my research paper), I could recite benefits at great length to anyone who even mentioned breast feeding and did so to anyone I thought would benefit from my great depth of knowledge of the subject. All this led Anna to start to warm up to the idea. I agreed to be supportive (overbearing) and to help her if she tried to breast feed. She had no idea what she was getting herself into.

Being an intellectual who learns and lives by what is written in books the next day I spent a paycheck in Barnes and Noble on lactation and breast feeding books. I took the next three days off and immersed myself in my new material. I asked questions to anyone I knew who had breast fed. This included people in the supermarket. Mothers at my son’s cub scouts meeting, and coworkers. I surfed the internet about any recent articles that involved lactation and called the local groups for information. Wouldn’t you know that I soon thought of myself as an expert in the field. I tried to join the local La Leche and even though I was the first male that they could remember who tried to join, they informed me that I would indeed benefit from taking my wife to the meetings, not attending a meeting by myself.

This was about the time that I started to notice my wife becoming a little hesitant. Yeah she put up with me answering all the questions at the OB visit, “Yes DR. she is having cramps, and she has not been eating a well balanced meal, No I think that she could benefit from a natural child birth” But when I tried to demonstrate the proper technique to get a baby to latch on correctly while at the gym with a young girls doll, she walked away. I couldn’t understand why she did no want to talk about this? I figured that maybe she would enjoy (or I would) going to a class the local free health clinic puts on that discussed everything related to breast feeding.