Hummus is my Love Language

I was sitting at the table with Harrison yesterday, he was eating some combination of chicken and chickpeas and sweet potato and cheese, and I was munching away on raw carrots with a hefty amount of hummus. He asked for hummus, and I gave him some- on my finger, into his mouth, as usual- but he quickly made it known that he wanted the carrots, not the hummus. And once he had a carrot, he held it back out to me and very clearly communicated that he wanted the hummus ON the carrot.

I had to laugh. Lately he's been eating chips and salsa, because it's a staple of mine, and now he wants carrots and hummus, the same way I eat them every single day.

So we sat at the table together for a while longer, Harrison licking/biting the hummus off the partially eaten carrot stick with his eight teeth, and handing the carrot back to me to ask for more hummus. That's my son.

I could eat hummus all day long. I don't love raw carrot sticks, but pair them with hummus and I can eat them all day long as well. Healthy raw carrots, healthy homemade (of course) hummus. You can eat hummus all day long too- if you have a food processor, just take five minutes and follow this general recipe.

(Also, my food processor is one of the most used gadgets in my kitchen. When the day comes that it dies, it will be replaced immediately, no time for mourning. I use this one, thanks to the recommendation of this blog. I've had it for at least three years and it still works great.)

Ingredients
-1-3 garlic cloves
-2 lemons (+ more to taste)
-1/2 cup tahini
-salt to taste
-a teaspoon or so of cumin
-3 cups chickpeas
-olive oil
-water as needed

Process
Peel and roughly chop the garlic cloves, then throw them in the food processor and run it for a few seconds to finish the garlic job. Scrape the garlic down off the sides, add the juice of the lemons and the tahini, and the salt and cumin, run the food processor again for a bit to blend everything together. Add about half the chickpeas and a swirl of olive oil, blend for a bit, then add the rest of the chickpeas and some more olive oil. Blend. If the chickpeas aren't breaking down enough, add more oil, or water. I like my hummus to be very strongly flavored, so I go light on the water since it thins the consistency AND the flavor. It's a matter of taste, find the balance you prefer. If the finished product is missing a zing, try adding more lemon juice and/or salt.

Once you've found the texture and flavor you like, scrape into a bowl and top with more olive oil and some paprika for taste and aesthetic value.

This recipe can be easily halved. If you're using cans of chickpeas, one 15oz can is 1.5 cups.

If you want a different flavor- try making pizza hummus!

-1-3 cloves of garlic
-1/4 cup tomato paste
-4 tablespoons shredded Parmesan cheese
-1 teaspoon oregano
-salt to taste
-1 cup chickpeas
-olive oil
-water as needed

Use the same method of garlic first, then tomato paste, cheese, oregano, and salt, then the chickpeas, with oil and water as needed. So tasty, you'll want to eat it with a spoon!

Happy hummus making!

Recovering Vegetarian

I stopped eating meat during my senior year of college. It was a long time coming really; I've never enjoyed seafood, and I have memories of dousing steak in A1 just to get it down. Thanksgiving turkey always tasted too dry. Ham and bacon were (and are) still delicious, and chicken was a great base for almost any meal, but I was at the beginning of my plunge into well-sourced foods, and I didn't have the money to shell out for happy, healthy meats. So I decided to try it for my last semester of college.

I really can't tell you what I ate that semester, I'm fairly certain I had yet to discover my love for all things garbanzo beans, but my exploration into vegetarianism went well enough that I stuck with it after that.

For the next few years I ate strictly vegetarian, still for the purpose of saving money. My stance was, and has always been, the following:

Animals were created for us to care for- to respect, treat kindly, and see them as part of God's creation. They were created for us to use in our day-to-day lives as well- for companionship and work, as well as to nourish us. From their first day of life to their last breath, we need to respect these creatures and care for them in a way that shows that.

With that little manifesto, I continued to choose to not eat meat, while being understanding of the choices of others. Somewhere along the line my choice turned more into an ethical decision rather than purely financial- I just didn't have the heart for a while to think about all the details of meat. I even attempted eating vegan for a short bit, though that attempt did not last too long because cheese.

Over my years of vegetarianism, I have gone farther and farther down the rabbit hole of what healthy eating really and truly means to me. These days, and probably forever more, healthy eating means consuming real, whole food, free from insecticides, free from preservatives, free from unnatural alterations. It also means avoiding refined sugar (aside from the occasional dark chocolate bar or ice cream or muffin because who wants to live without those??) (oh also I love pizza, any pizza, and don't often turn it down) and being mindful of my natural sugar intake. I also do my best to avoid soy products and most corn products (aside from my favorite tortilla chips.)

When you eat like that ^ you basically avoid allllllll of the center aisles and freezer section of the grocery store. Most tomato sauce has sugar and canola oil in it. My favorite salsa had "natural flavors" in it, which is code for many nasty ingredients that aren't actually natural. Pre-packaged foods are made with so many things I can't even pronounce.

And so, homemade everything. It's been a process (I ate the last jar of my favorite salsa only a few weeks ago), but bit by bit over the past few years, and continuing on into the future, I've made subtle changes to my diet and lifestyle (and because I do all the cooking, Jer and Harrison's diets too), and it's just become a way of life.

Going farther and farther down the rabbit hole, I came across the Weston A. Price Foundation and found that I agreed with so many things they had to say about diet (how could you not when they promote all the butter?!)

My diet, and my family's diet, is far from WAP guidelines, but learning about them has helped me take a step in their direction. And they are All About Meat. Well sourced meat, to be more specific, as that is where you can find so many essential vitamins and nutrients that your body needs to thrive.

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Being in charge of the nutrition of a tiny little being's is no easy task when you are as picky as I am prone to be. Harrison still breastfeeds (and often, these days, as we are in a bit of a transition and it is his comforting place), and he is getting great nutrition from my milk. But he is ever growing and at 14 months old I don't want his diet to consist of just breast milk and garbanzo beans. Additionally, Jer and I began realizing that he (Jer) wasn't functioning as well as he could or should be, and we attributed it to the lack of animal protein in his diet. So over the past few months, change has been in the air in the Kozeluh household. It's all been revving up to last Sunday, when we started a new routine that we intend to keep until it no longer works for us- we bought a whole chicken at the Farmers Market. We talked to the farmer, we looked at pictures of his ranch in Northern California, and we bought a chicken that was raised happy.

Hah. You guys, I went from cooking only vegetarian to looking at this fully intact fresh chicken on my kitchen counter. (Well let's be real we did buy a few chicken breasts from the grocery store over the past few months as well, but they are far less intimidating than a WHOLE CHICKEN.)

But intimidation be damned- Jeremy bought me an Instant Pot last month! It's really a good thing too, because who wants to turn the oven on when it's 85 degrees and you don't have an air conditioner? (Ugh and well the oven still does get turned on. Every Saturday morning. To bake sourdough bread. Which is important.)

So for the past two Sundays, we've gotten a chicken from the Farmers Market, covered it in salt and pepper and herbs. put it in the Instant Pot with some water and onion and carrots and garlic, cooked it for 35 minutes, carved it, put all the inedibles back in the pot with more water and parsley and salt and apple cider vinegar, and then cooked that for two hours. Voila- chicken for the week and for the freezer, and bone broth to last until the next Sunday!

Let's be honest here, I still haven't brought myself to actually eat the chicken (though I DID cook lentils in the broth and ate them). But Jeremy and Harrison are both now starting their days with a nourishing cup of bone broth, and fully enjoying chicken with their lunches. (And I have been adding gelatin to my green smoothies, so there's another step in that direction.)

When I prepare the chicken, each time I have thanked it for its life, and for the nourishment that it is going to bring to us. (Laugh all you want, I don't mind.) I think it's important for Harrison to understand what his food is and where it comes from, vegetables and meats alike, and I want him to not take any of it for granted.

So our household is slowly changing, again. Just another baby step on our path to what feels best for us to be happy and healthy, nourished and thriving.

Stream of Consciousness

We just spent two wonderful weeks in Lexington, Kentucky with Jeremy's family, many dear friends, and for a few days some my family as well. We crammed in delicious places to eat (Kentucky Native Cafe, Bourbon n' Toulouse, Mellow Mushroom, Bella Notte, Saul Good, West Sixth Brewery, and of course Chipotle), Harrison and his cousin Oliver had a blast playing together (and Harrison LOVED Oliver's extensive toy collection), we played (and won!) many hands of Canasta with Jer's parents (ok we lost some too), we celebrated the wedding of two beautiful souls (and Harrison slept through the ceremony!), we had a small birthday party for Harrison with our families (it was Totoro themed), we helped the masses clear out the Whole Foods at Lexington Green on its last day (75% off everything = yes please!), we drowned in what felt like 100% humidity (and plenty of downpours), and when we left, it was with full hearts (and a queasy stomach because unfortunately I chose my one sick day of the century to be our day of cross country plane travel with a 14-month-old). But for real, you guys, FULL HEARTS.

And now we are back to "real life" for a week, and then an adjustment once again to a new "real life" is coming as I start working full time with Harrison in tow this coming Wednesday.

Lots of things going on this week and lots of things running through my mind. I'd really love to just binge watch Jane the Virgin season 3, and while admittedly I am already 5 episodes in, it is specifically because of that that there are so many things on my mental to do list right now. Day-to-day things have already piled up in the post-vacation sleepy haze, and I haven't quite kicked this stomach bug yet, though it's been ebbing a flowing, making me think that I have at certain points in time. My heart is still running on full from the past two weeks, and my brain keeps jumping from one thing to another, a constant stream of jumbled thoughts like what should I do with those lemons I got the other day (maybe this?) and how am I going to get all those mats out of Oscar's fur without sedating him? What should the meal plan be for my workweek and when am I going to have time for food prep? My friend Laci stayed at our place while we were gone and left us some seeds she started sprouting, therefore showing me how easy it is and now I want to sprout ALL THE THINGS with the same fervor I have for fermenting all the things. I ran some preliminary numbers a few months ago and found that with this job I am starting, we can pay down the rest of our student loans by the time it's over next September, if we continue to live frugally. But I haven't even updated June's expenses, or finished July's budget, and I don't see that as a great beginning to our debt takedown, and I want to run the numbers again to make a specific plan. But will the plan allow me to continue to have enough organic greens to make the green smoothie I've had for the past three days and am already obsessed with? And can I afford to buy our cats wet food? And what about our new old car that hopefully will last us until next year but in reality it needs some repairs and should we have just kept the Accord? And Harrison is really killing this elimination communication thing and I want to replace his cloth diapers with padded cotton underwear so he can play a more active role in pottying, and I love that at just shy of 14 months we are already able to think about underwear for him. And less diapers means not doing laundry every two days in our one-cubic-foot portable washer that has been so helpful but takes up the whole bathroom whenever we use it. And our bathroom is so dirty even when it is clean, and our landlord wasn't helpful when I asked about replacing the mildewed grout, and I really love our apartment because it is home (and it is rent controlled), but it was a bit of a weird thing to come home to it after being in a large clean house for two weeks, and visiting the large clean houses of our friends, and let's face it, our old apartment is a dump. A spacious, rent-controlled dump that works well for our purposes right now and we're staying for the unforeseeable future, but that doesn't make it any less of a dump. Can I use my 30th birthday in a few weeks to justify hiring someone to clean this place for me? It will probably still feel dirty. We're going to see a Beatles cover band on my birthday and I am so very excited about it. LA has so many opportunities that I've never had anywhere else, like seeing a Beatles cover band on my birthday (well in Lexington I saw Rain which was awesome, and in Louisville we went to Abbey Road on the River which was also awesome), and making the same full-time salary with my son as I did without my son, and being at the beach and the mountains on the same day and soaking in sunshine all the time and being surrounded by a diverse spectrum of humanity and being connected to the natural birthing community and all the same this place is so transient and it's hard after a trip away to not think about if I will someday be one of the masses that comes just to leave again like so many in my community already have. And there are things like SB277 that make me want to be transient more quickly than may be natural but there are things like illegal home births in other states that make me want to stay put, and how do you move out of state with three cats anyway? And SB277 makes me think of Nick Catone and the autopsy reports for his healthy dead child and his response. Healthy children don't die in their sleep for nothing and the whole thing makes me so frustrated. And sometimes I get down such a rabbit hole on the Internet that I need to put my phone away and do something else, but other times like yesterday I took a Buzzfeed quiz that told me I would be a House Elf if I lived in the Harry Potter world and I was all indignant about it so I took the quiz two more times and answered the questions differently but still truthfully and apparently I'm destined (doomed?) to be a house elf. Now where is that to do list?

A love story

Jer and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary last week. (And by "celebrated" I mean he made me pancakes in the morning and we both worked and came home and we ate ice cream in the evening.) We've known each other for almost twelve years now, and we dated for three years before we got married. That's a lot of numbers and a lot of time (and so very little time in the grand scheme of it all, I suppose.)

So what went on during all those years?

I was quite the boy crazy college freshman. (And sophomore. And junior. I like to think I leveled off and grew up a bit by senior year.) And would you know that Jeremy was the first boy in college that I had a cute little crush on? I don't actually have a strong recollection of the first time we met, but I remember that I ended up going to a Coldplay concert with friends a few weeks in, and I was so excited that the cute boy with the unpronounceable last name was also going.

We ended up chatting a lot before the concert started- not that I had anything to do with it. Boy crazy and frustratingly quiet, shy, and void of conversational topics- that was me in an awkward nutshell. Jeremy has always been good at trying to include anyone he sees on the fringes, and he saw me sitting on my own (probably journaling in an effort to look cool), and I became the subject of his friendly graces. We talked about music, he started a playlist on his iPod mini that he said he would burn to a CD for me, and I was overwhelmingly excited that the cute boy was engaging in (likely one-sided) conversation with me AND we had a reason to talk again if I wanted to get that CD.

babies

Fall semester continued on and we were in the same friend group, but anytime I tried to talk with him I didn't know what to say, and he had run out of conversation too. If we ever ended up alone, it was painstakingly awkward, and we both knew it. Regardless, my cute little crush continued, because he had great hair and great glasses and great jeans and he liked The Beatles.

Spring semester came upon us and I decided to volunteer to help with lighting in the theatre production of Marvin's Room. Jer happened to have a small role in it, and I honestly can't remember if I decided to volunteer before or after I knew that. Awkwardness still ensued anytime we were alone, but thankfully Marvin's Room meant we were mostly together in group settings.

Cast and crew of Marvin's Room, Jeremy ever the goofy one.

Alongside Marvin's Room, one of my best friend schemed up some time for me, her, and Jeremy to hang out together. We spent an evening running around campus, taking lots of pictures and ending up at the baseball fields. The two of them did most of the talking, and I watched, googly-eyed at the boy whose last name I probably still couldn't pronounce. We set up another time for the three of us to get together, and said best friend bailed shortly before it happened. So Jer and I found ourselves with an evening alone, and we were both terrified because we knew we wouldn't have anything to talk about. We spent some time together eating cereal in the dugouts at the baseball fields and stammering out some sentences in between long awkward pauses. We finally did find some conversation- emotionally unloading all the negativity in our lives- forging a connection that felt so strong but was so unhealthily shallow.

One of our first pictures together, a night charged with awkwardness and relentless flirting

In the weeks that followed, Marvin's Room was the main event, rehearsal after rehearsal after rehearsal. Jer and I remained awkward anytime we were together, and my crush only grew. After opening night we went for a walk and the best thing that could ever happen to an awkward girl who has an awkward crush on a cute boy happened- he kissed me. OH GLORY BE. I probably still couldn't pronounce his last name but I kissed the cute boy with great hair and great glasses and great jeans who liked The Beatles!

I went to bed that night with a goofy smile on my face and felt like I was in a fairy tale.

The fairy take came to a quick demise about 12 hours after THE KISS, when I saw him in the cafeteria and he pretended to not see me and walk the other direction. A classic move that happened for most of the rest of the semester. (I'm over it now, now worries.)

We made partial peace by the end of the semester and parted ways for the summer.

Sophomore year started and Jeremy and I were still in the same friend group and saw each other often. New freshman joined our group and I grew to be best friends with a lovely girl who I had actually met during the previous semester, when she was visiting as a prospective student and stayed in my dorm room ... the same night as THE KISS. Irony of all ironies, she and Jeremy began dating later that year.

So to recap:
1. Awkward crush on cute boy.
2. Kiss cute boy.
3. Cute boy pretends I don't exist.
4. Cute boy starts dating my best friend.

I don't dwell on those details much, it was a confusing time of life even without being boy crazy and heartbroken, and Jer and I formed a decent friendship through all of my third-wheeling over the next two years while they dated, and then after that as well. (You can be well assured that my Freshman year crush was long over.)

College graduation came and went, and there is photographic evidence of our friendship- see:

I love this picture for so many reasons. From left: Stephen and I have babies born on the exact same day (hooray May 3, 2016!), Dustin and I still see each other every year or two, I married Jeremy, Caleb and I remain long-distance friends and will be seeing each other for the first time in AGES in just a week, and Graham and I live in the same crazy city and see each other fairly regularly.

Fast-forward a year after graduation, and I found myself back in our little college town for a friend's wedding. Jeremy still lived in the area and arranged a reunion of our friend group, since many of us came back to town. He and I had not kept in touch since graduation but we were still friends by association.

I remember the moment I first saw him again, we were at a pizza place in downtown Lexington and the table was crowded, but for whatever reason he stuck out to me. I honestly hadn't even given him any thought in a year, but it was like a long-awaited meet-cute in the restaurant that day. The moment came and went quickly, we hugged and I got a little flutter in my stomach, and then we got caught up in conversations with other people, hardly even saying goodbye at the end of the evening.

I was surprised the next day when he texted me, mentioning that it had been great to see me and he was bummed we hadn't had the opportunity to chat the night before, and maybe he and I could get together that night?

Apparently our meet-cute had affected him as well.

So we did get together that night, and what did we do? We TALKED. For HOURS. Late into the night. About everything imaginable. A far cry from five years previous. Our conversation was fluid and enjoyable (and completely platonic). It was so much fun, we did the same thing the next night. And then I went back home, a few states away, and couldn't get our newfound friendship off my mind.

In the weeks that followed we sent email after email after email. Our friendship grew and deepened in a very healthy way, all the while staying platonic, but becoming very special. We were both figuring out what to do with our lives post-college, and we asked each other hard questions, gave encouragement, formed inside jokes, and got to really know who the other was. Sure maybe in hindsight that is when we started falling in love, but neither one of us was yet aware of it.

There was another wedding coming up, two months after our initial reunion. I was in the wedding party, and Jeremy was invited but unsure if he could get there. He ended up arranging to be there last minute and so there we were in northern Michigan in the summertime, after two months of intensely beautiful and connecting emails, and we finally realized what exactly was going on once we were face-to-face. I wasn't a very good bridesmaid that weekend (something I wish I could have a do-over with), my thoughts and every moment of spare time was with this boy, this man, who came back into my life unexpectedly and made me a better person. We were young and naive, but we (thankfully!) were so far removed from the awkward Freshmen we were when we first met.

At the wedding where it all began (again)

Sometime after that we were officially dating, though there is no "official" date for that. I travelled to Scotland and Northern Ireland and spent the bulk of both trips Skyping with Jer (we're taking hours upon hours at a time.) I had already been anticipating a big life change after that trip, and so I decided that life change would be moving to Lexington to be closer to Jeremy. A year after that I moved to Los Angeles for the same reason.

Where else do the dating wanna-be hippies go?

It was a beautiful beginning to our dating relationship, and of course there were rocky and ugly moments in the middle, but everything culminated to getting engaged by a creek near my parent's house in Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve 2012, two and a half years after that trip to northern Michigan, and I took his unpronounceable last name on a farm in PA on June 1, 2013.

December 24, 2012

If anyone would have pointed him out to me Freshman year and said "That's the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with," I'm not sure I would have believed it, and probably would have been terrified about the potential of a lifetime of poor conversation. It's a good thing that the normal trajectory of life is to always be growing up, always looking to better yourself. When we started dating we were very different people than those awkward Freshman at the Coldplay concert.

June 1, 2013

I love that one of my first memories of Jer, at that concert, is one that showcases one of his best qualities- still today, and probably forevermore, he is an includer. He can't see someone on their own or someone who needs help without going out of his way to strike up conversation and make them feel included, or offer a hand in whatever they need help with. Would we have even spoken that night if not for Jer's caring heart? Perhaps it's due to just that personality trait that I have a lifetime ahead of me with this man who still has great hair, and great glasses, and great jeans, and loves The Beatles.

April 2016

By the way, "Koz" rhymes with "Oz," like in the Wizard of Oz. The rest of it is pronounced "low."

The Kozeluh family, Easter 2017.

Koz-low.

Breastfeeding

About six years ago I attended a Doula training during which I learned about the "breast crawl"- When a baby is born and placed on the mother's stomach, it has the instinctive ability to crawl up to the breast and latch on without any help. We watched a few videos of this seeming phenomenon, and I was convinced that it was the only way; someday when I had babies they would crawl up my stomach and latch on and breastfeeding would be beautiful and perfect from the very first hour of life outside my womb.

I'm not sure anything is ever really beautiful and perfect from the get go, and Harrison's and my breastfeeding relationship certainly was not.

Harrison was born after 61 hours of labor in a way that was very different from my hopeful birth plan. There was a lot of activity around us for a while as we were skin to skin for his first moments of life, I was exhausted from the intensity of the past few days, and Harrison was likely a bit groggy since I ended up with an epidural (and who knows what else they pumped in me.) There was no breast crawl, and hardly a mention of breastfeeding for a while. I have no recollection of the moment Harrison first latched, or of any of the first moments we were trying to latch. No teary-eyed picture of my newborn and I bonding in that way at all (which was part of the beautiful and perfect fantasy.)

My first memory of breastfeeding is of a few hours after Harrison was born, and the nurse saying to me "I don't usually like to offer a nipple shield before a baby is 24 hours old but ..." And so it was with that help that Harrison and I began breastfeeding, with a piece of plastic between us. I so did not want it, but I was offered no other advice, and my baby needed to eat. (I had a small knowledge of breastfeeding from a class I took before Harrison was born, but I don't think anything can prepare you for the application of that knowledge when everything is brand new and you are too out of it to make conscious decisions.)

We left the hospital the next day but not before the hospital lactation consultant visited with us, per my request because I wanted to nurse without a nipple shield. I remember only two things from the time she spent with us - 1. She had a lot of things to say and I felt like I was being talked at rather than helped. And 2. She asked if she could put a drop of sugar water on my breast to encourage Harrison to latch. After an hour of being talked at I learned nothing, and Harrison hadn't latched, and we went home with the nipple shield.

One of our midwives came to check on us the next day and everything looked great aside from Harrison being slightly jaundiced, and that I was still sorting out how to nurse him, even with the shield. So it was suggested I reach out to a lactation support company who would send someone the next day to both check his bilirubin levels (for the jaundice) and help us out with nursing.

That visit was an interesting one. The LC brought a very specific nursing pillow with her and talked me through the steps of nursing Harrison with the pillow. To my request of getting rid of the shield, she said I'd likely be able to stop using it in a few weeks. Looking back, it was another person talking at me and giving generic answers to my questions. Towards the end of her visit she started talking about how she was running late for her next client. I was feeling good enough at that point and she left in a hurry. But then Jer and I were left with needing to go out and buy more things (the very specific nursing pillow that was an important part of the only way she showed me to nurse), and while my post-partum brain thought that I had just gotten a lot of help, after processing through it a week later I realized it had been mostly a waste of time. My questions hadn't been answered and my thoughts hadn't been heard.

Fast-forward almost two weeks later, at another follow up appointment with our midwife when we found out Harrison hadn't gained any weight for a week. Our midwife wrote that he was "failure to thrive" and made sure I reached out to another lactation consultant immediately.

Ugh. The heaviness of that scenario was rough. I felt like all I was doing was nursing, it felt awkward each time and I was starting to dread him needing to eat, I had been "helped" by three different people (who, in hindsight, were part of the reason he wasn't nursing well), and I just didn't know what to do.

The one thing I do love, looking back on the messiness of that time, is that never once did someone mention a bottle or formula. It never even crossed my mind, and I am so thankful to have had people around me who wanted to see Harrison and I work out our nursing relationship and knew that we could, and so in their support they never mentioned an alternative to breastfeeding, instead they talked about a plan for Harrison and I to better learn how to do it. I see far too often formula pushed as the "only" option- given as an assumption that if a baby is not gaining weight, Mama isn't producing enough milk- while in reality it is not quite as common as it seems for mothers to not make enough milk for their babies. I wish that instead of formula being the very first thing talked about, mainstream advice would first look to checking for lip and tongue ties, encourage nursing on demand, discourage sleeping through the night, check how efficiently the baby is getting milk, and through all that giving mothers the tools they need to have the correct milk supply and the confidence that they ARE enough to feed their babies. And even after all that, I wish more women were made aware of donor milk and/or supplemental nursing systems if they do end up needing to search out an alternative. My issue is not with formula, but with the lack of support and options given to mothers in mainstream pediatric practices. If I hadn't been seen by my "crunchy" midwives, and if I hadn't already had a little bit of knowledge surrounding breastfeeding, I was in the perfect situation to be given formula for Harrison and left to my own devices after that- and this is AFTER being helped by three different women who's jobs were to help Harrison and me establish breastfeeding. I am so thankful that the support I had in the process was always "How can we help breastfeeding be established better so that Harrison is eating enough?"

It was with that support that I (finally) reached out to a friend who is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant. Why she wasn't the first person we talked to is beyond me, I wasn't thinking clearly those days and other people were making decisions for me.

Kim came to our home the very next day, with a softness and gentle energy I hadn't yet felt by anyone else in her field. She took one look at the nipple shield and told me to put it in the trash. She watched me struggle with the nursing pillow for all of 10 seconds and then we set it aside for good. She checked Harrison out. She checked me out. We grabbed a bunch of pillows from our bed and she showed me and Jeremy how to use them to get Harrison to nurse in a variety of positions. She showed me how to actively help Harrison nurse, and got him to latch immediately. He was gulping down milk so fast and strong we could hear it hitting his stomach. We chatted, and I was listened to. As questions arose, they were answered. Harrison and I were looked at as two individuals learning how to do something together in a unique way best suited only to us. She left by showing me how to side-lie nurse in bed, Harrison next to me, me in the middle, and Jeremy being an active participant by cuddling as the big spoon. There was a calmness in the air and for the first time in two weeks, I had a bit of confidence that everything was going to be okay.

Kim came back two days later to weigh Harrison and was looking for a one ounce weight gain. He had gained THREE ounces and was already starting to form the double chin that has stuck with him now for the past year.

And everything was okay after that, though not to say it was all rainbows and butterflies. I was stressed out for the better part of the next few weeks, tracking all his feeds, listening for his gulps, and being very hands on when he nursed, as he still needed a lot of support to be efficient with it. I was exhausted, my breasts were sore, and I was constantly worried that he wasn't getting enough. But time released the fears, little by little, and nursing became easier and easier, and at some point it became second nature and neither of us had to exert much effort. I was finally in the place I wanted to be with breastfeeding.

Harrison and I have continued to have a wonderful nursing relationship. He exclusively nursed for close to seven months, and we started slowly on solids- giving him the opportunity to learn flavors and textures, rather than looking at the food as a source of nutrition- so for almost his entire first year he thrived on mostly breast milk. These days he is obsessed with eating solids and nurses noticeably less, even turning down the opportunity at times. But he still nurses frequently at night and nap time, and I am eager to continue that through at least age two, and am hopeful that he will still ask for the occasional feed a year or two or three after that.

first birthday nursing snuggles

I am thankful that while learning to breastfeed had its struggles and frustrations, the only "problem" we had was bad advice. Harrison simply wasn't able to nurse effectively with that darn nipple shield. I am doubly thankful we were finally able to find good advice to get us on track for our positive nursing experience. I know there are so many issues that women face in their breastfeeding journeys that can take a lot more effort, time, and intervention to fix; I sincerely hope that mainstream knowledge will start to take a turn and focus more on how to help new Mamas and babies efficiently nurse and that more positive breastfeeding support will be available for everyone who needs it.

I will breastfeed here or there, I will breastfeed anywhere