Stardate 59776.63 - Breastfeeding Class

Cheryl and I went to a 3+ hour breastfeeding class at NYU Medical Center last night. First observation - there were a lot more husbands there than I was expecting. I thought I'd be the only guy there, but there were 6 couples and then three women without husbands (one of whom had been in our classes over the weekend). The information was really good, although I have found these nurses to be a little militant in their approach to this information. We were told, for example, to take our What to Expect The First Year book and cut out the entire chapter on breastfeeding and throw it away. I now plan to read it extensively to see why it is so "wrong" and out of alignment with the course we just took. The NY Times recently did an article about the What to Expect... books and the nurses both over the weekend and at the class last night took great pleasure in bringing up that article and how "it explained that the What to Expect... books are just wrong!" Well, I disagree. That is not what the article said. The article's main point, I believe, was that the old What to Expect... books did not cover all these low probability issues and problems that people can experience, and all of these mothers complained about how their specialty issue wasn't covered so now the books have swung in the other direction and they have information on every single possible thing that could go wrong...and some mothers are frightened by the information. I don't think the point is that these books are wrong, but the nursing staff seems to feel that they are next to useless. I disagree, and so do all the other mothers in my family and across my friends.

Regardless of that factoid, the class was highly enjoyable and quite interesting. They did spend too much time selling us on the benefits of breastfeeding, as everyone there was already convinced of the benefits. But we did learn how to get the little one to latch on and lots of other information and the instructor even gave everyone her home number in case anyone had any issues after the birth - I though that was a nice touch.

So we gave the class a resounding thumbs up...we just didn't like getting home after 10 PM.