dragonlady wrote:

In article ,
Clisby Williams wrote:



dragonlady wrote:



In article ymHPa.38200$H17.11890@sccrnsc02, "Corinne"
wrote:





I was alerted to this article on an email group I'm part of....I was AMAZED
and greatly disappointed to read the following:

"The August 2003 issue of Real Simple magazine, currently on newstands,
contains an article titled "20 Time Wasting Rules to Break Now."
(page 136)

What's one of the rules to break? Breastfeeding. The article states
that with bottle-feeding, "you know exactly how much food the baby is
eating, and Mom may be less tired because Dad has no excuse to sleep
through 3 a.m. feedings."




Aside from everything else that's wrong with this, I can't, personally,
imagine that bottle feeding is LESS time consuming that breast feeding
-- assuming you aren't "propping" your baby, which is a bad idea anyway.
I know I visited households with twins the same age as mine who were
being bottle fed, and the amount of time devoted to mixing formula,
cleaning bottles, buying stuff, and, in one case, keeping the two
formulas seperate -- it just looked like a real time consuming effort
compared to plopping a breast (or two) out.

meh




Actually, that's the one thing I agree with. My first child was
formula-fed, and my second
breastfed. The formula-feeding was definitely simpler for me. But
then, it might have
made my life "simpler" to plop the babies in a playpen in a soundproofed
room and close
the door. What's simplest is not always what's preferable.

Clisby




I don't want to dispute you -- I believe you -- but I can't figure out
how formula and bottles could be simpler than breastfeeding, especially
if you spend much time out of the house, but even if you are home all
the time.

Can you explain how it was simpler?

meh



Sure. The major thing, of course, is that if you formula-feed a child,
you don't have to do
it all. Until my daughter was about 7 months old, my husband did the
majority of the
feeding (he was the SAHP for most of that time.) How could BF possibly
have been simpler for me?

With my breastfed child: for the first 3 months, breastfeeding was
very difficult. YMMV,
but I can't consider something that caused that much pain to have made
my life simpler.
The second three months were much better, but still not easy, by any
measure. And again,
I had to do it all. That's the huge downside of breastfeeding. I
think it's easy now; but
I have a 17-month-old who only nurses 3-4 times in a 24-hour period, and
probably wouldn't
care if I cut it back to twice.

In my experience of reading these newsgroups, people who talk about the
inconvenience
of formula feeding typically are grossly exaggerating the amount of time
and bother it takes.
Here's the kind of thing I read:

1. You have to sterilize bottles. (No, you don't.)
2. You have to get up in the middle of the night and fix a bottle.
(Only if your definition
of "fixing a bottle" is: reach in the refrigerator, pull out a
bottle, stick it in the baby's
mouth. If you have a picky baby, maybe you microwave it for 10
seconds first.)
3. If you go out with the baby, you have to wait until you find
somewhere to warm up
the bottle. (No, you don't.)
4. You have to go to the trouble of buying the formula. (Oh, give me
a break.)
5. You might run out of formula. (Never happened. How much
trouble is it to remember
to buy the only food your baby eats?)



Clisby