Now that my son has reached the ripe age of 1, I’ve started to wean him from breastfeeding and onto whole milk. Well, I should say, I’ve tried to start. He wants no part of it. He has had zero interest in whole milk, and in fact, when I try to give him cow’s milk, he only seems to want to nurse more. My plan was to try to cut out one feeding each week or so (or opt for a longer duration, if the transition becomes hard), but so far, we are going backwards because he is nursing more now than he was before.

How do you wean a baby who is very attached to breastfeeding? I want to make the transition smooth for him, so if that means waiting a month or two and trying again, I’m fine with that (actually, I expected the weaning process to take somewhere between 1 and 6 months to complete anyway, which is why I thought I’d start now).

For us, part of the problem is that my son really doesn’t like sippy cups (well, he loves to gnaw on them but not drink from them). We haven’t fed him from a bottle in months, so when I tried that, he rejected it, too. So, I haven’t figured out how to get him to drink the cow’s milk.

What do you recommend? How did you wean your baby? At what age did you wean him/her? Did you hit any roadblocks?

I’d like to consider myself a giving person, so once I got the hang of breastfeeding, I explored how to donate excess milk to a milk bank. I really wanted to be able to help out babies (and moms) who couldn’t otherwise get breastmilk. However, after doing some research, I found myself appalled by the process.

First, because it is illegal (at least in the U.S.) for a person to sell any type of his/her bodily fluids, breastmilk must be donated, not sold. A donating mother must undergo a battery of tests to be sure that she does not have any transmissible diseases (I couldn’t find clear info about who would pay for these tests).

Then, a mother gives her milk to a milk bank where it gets pasteurized. This was my first frustration with the process. So much of the nutrients in breastmilk are lost through the pasteurization process that I wonder if the pasteurized breastmilk is still superior to commercial formulas.

But even if the milk is still more nutritional, my biggest beef with the process was the cost. A breastfeeding mother donates her milk for free (and possibly pays for all of her testing out of pocket). Then a bank gets the free milk, pasteurizes it (which, from what I understand is not an incredibly expensive process), and then sells it…for $2.50 an ounce on average! If a baby is drinking a standard 32 ounces a day, it would cost a family $80/day or $2,400/month to buy donated breastmilk. I was in shock when I learned this. I wanted to help other families, not make them take out a second mortgage on their house in order to buy my breastmilk. My donated breastmilk.

Why should milk banks make so much money on such transactions?! I was disgusted—especially since I was most hoping to help needy families who might not otherwise have access to breastmilk. Clearly, though, they would never be able to afford donated milk. So, I gave up on traditional donating. I did find some pseudo-black markets for breastmilk where mothers donate straight to families. Of course, the receiving families can’t be sure that the donating mothers are healthy since they haven’t undergone testing. But, on the upside, the families will receive the most nutritional, unpasteurized milk for their babies. And, in my opinion, if a mother is willing to feed her breastmilk to her own baby, that’s probably a good litmus test for the quality of her milk.

Still, I didn’t feel comfortable participating in an “under the table” type of donation program. Sigh. So I never ended up finding a situation in which I felt comfortable donating.

Has anyone out there donated breastmilk? What type of program did you use? Were you frustrated by the huge profit that the milk bank made (if you used one)?

D.C.-area moms have been buzzing about an incident that happened at one of the Smithsonian museums a few weeks ago. A mother was breastfeeding her child in the Hirshhorn museum when a security guard asked her to move into the bathroom to nurse. When she found no chairs in the bathroom, she returned to a bench in the public area of the museum. The guard then told her that she had to nurse in the bathroom and that she could sit on a toilet if no chair was available. Ultimately, the mother chose to leave the museum. Area mothers were so appalled by the way she was treated (especially considering that mothers have a legal right to nurse their babies in public) that they subsequently staged a “nurse-in” at the same museum to promote acceptance of breastfeeding.

Though hundreds of mothers participated in the nurse-in, interestingly there were very few black mothers present. According to The Root, black women are less likely to breastfeed their children than any other race of women in the U.S. More discouragingly, the breastfeeding initiation rate (that is, the percentage of women who try to breastfeed their newborn in the hospital) among black women has been dropping in recent years. The Root explains that while some social stigma remains in the general public about breastfeeding (especially breastfeeding in public), the stigma seems to be heightened in the black community.

Have any of you breastfeeding mothers felt judged for nursing in public? What are ways that mothers can help reduce the social stigma surrounding breastfeeding in general?

I admit it. I watch trashy TV sometimes. In fact, I love trashy TV. So, when the Real Housewives producers decided to run the spin-off Bethenny Getting Married, I DVRed the whole season. I happened to watch an old episode the other day in which Bethenny’s baby nurse suggested she drink beer while nursing to increase her milk supply. What?! I had only ever heard that you should avoid all alcohol while nursing (or make sure you give your body sufficient time to oxidize the alcohol before the next nursing session), so this sounded fishy to me.

After doing a little research, I found my skepticism to be justified. Though there is an old wives’ tale that says that beer will increase milk supply, scientific research has debunked this theory. Any alcohol can throw off a mother’s milk-producing hormones, so beer can actually be detrimental to milk supply. So think before you drink! And talk to a lactation consultant for real help and advice. Check out Baby Center for more info on drinking and breastfeeding.