The Traveling Breastfeeder

It’s World Breastfeeding Week!! Ok, technically it starts Wednesday but we are ready to party now so we’re starting early! This week to celebrate breastfeeding, Emily and I are going to regale you with some of our favorite adventures in lactation. I’ll start by treating you to my experience nursing my eight-month-old “on the road” as we took her on her first family vacation last week to visit my parents at their home in the mountains of Virginia. We had been overly busy in July and were anxious to “get outta Dodge”, so to speak, but I was a little apprehensive about the seven hour drive because we’d not yet taken a road trip with Sophia, and I was afraid she’d be a bit of a cranky-pants. Turns out my mother’s intuition was correct (shocker)! We drove only 3.5 hours the first night, because I got a wicked deal on Priceline for a hotel room, but we stopped three times, once for food and twice for Miss Cranky-Pants! Unfortunately on the first leg of the trip there aren’t a whole lot of places to make a pit stop. The first place I nursed Sophie was in the parking lot of an elementary school. My husband took Joshua out to run around on the school playground while I fed our girl. Apparently and rather unfortunately, the school parking lot is rather a-happenin’ place during the summer for people who are NOT exactly of elementary age. Once Bobby and Joshua were out of sight, 6 adult males on bicycles made for 11-year-olds cycled slooooowly through, taking their time to size up our vehicle and its female occupants. I got a little sweaty. It was a bit unnerving, but they soon passed by. Then, a truck with a couple in it pulled up next to our car on the passenger side where I was nursing Baby So. Ack! The man got out of the car with a map and started to ask me for directions. I had a boob exposed AND I had no idea where I was! He prattled on for awhile and I listened patiently as my hungry baby squirmed and I struggled to keep myself covered up. Finally I got a word in edgewise and explained that I had no idea where I was either. He apologized and they went on their way. Of course at THIS moment my husband and son returned, and Sophie decided she was done snacking.

We continued on our way and about an hour later were on a stretch of I-35 in West Virginia that has little to offer but a lot of run-down trailers, a couple grandiose farm houses, and a XXX porno theatre. It’s just a two-lane highway at this point with not much shoulder, so when Sophie freaked out a second time, I got to breastfeed at…you guessed it….the porno theatre! That’s right, this lascivious location became my next lactating site. Bobby and I cracked up as we pulled in. We parked next to the road, right under the sign, as far away from the building as we could. There was a mini-van parked next to the building along with several trucks and I dared Bobby to go up to it and see if there were any car seats in it, but he was wouldn’t take the dare. As I was nursing Sophie, a trucker pulled in driving a big-rig. He drove very closely to us and I am sure from his high vantage point in his truck cab, he got an eyeful and was probably scared that the boobs he saw inside were going to be of the saggy and stretch-marked variety. Fortunately, Sophia was soon well-fed and calmed down, and we sped out of there before the proprietors could chase us away for scaring the clientele.

I nursed my baby girl in a variety of places on this trip – my parent’s front porch overlooking the Blue Ridge Parkway, an ice cream parlor, a children’s science museum (about three feet away from a nerdy gathering of teenaged boys – that was a fun one!), and a couple of Food Lion parking lots, to name a few. Some locations were more convenient than others, but I am so thankful that I’m able to feed her wherever and whenever she needs to be fed, and that she knows when she’s with me, her needs are going to be met.