Archive for breastfeeding

Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five by Penelope Leach

This is my go-to book for all infant and toddler-care matters.   I love Ms.  Leach’s writing style:  Direct, pro-child, often funny.   Her writing is clear and concise and always, always promotes love and respect for the child. 

She covers every topic a new, inexperienced parent needs to know, such as diapering, feeding, sleeping, teething, bonding and daily life with an infant and toddler.  She also provides ideas for games and more complicated toddler issues, such as introducing a new baby into the household. 

I keep this book handy and available and recommend it to everyone.

Pros: Child-centric,  direct advice.

Cons: The index doesn’t actually reference everything that is actually in the book, such as the Parent Question pages scattered throughout the book.  If you find something in those you want to find again later, you should bookmark it, or you’ll have to resort to scanning.

Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five  on Amazon.com.

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The Nursing Mother’s Companion by Kathleen Huggins

Oh, how I love this book.    It is well-written, well-organized, and answers just about any breastfeeding question you may have. 

The book is organized by age, with “Survival Guide” chapters for each that make it very easy to find information.  The non-Survival-Guide sections offer more detailed information on subjects like traveling, pumping, nursing children with special needs and calculations to help ensure that your baby is getting the amount of milk he needs.

Ms. Huggins writes with a clean, easy-to-read style.  She forgoes the flowery, earth-mothery prose that is so common in books about breastfeeding.   There is nothing wrong with passionate paragraphs espousing the joys of breastfeeding, but it’s nice not to have to sift through it all when what you really want is an answer to your question.

Pros:  All of it.  If I were to make a required reading list for new mothers, this would lead the pack.

Cons:  I should have read it while I was still pregnant instead of waiting until I actually needed it.  But I guess I can’t blame the book for that.

The Nursing Mother’s Companion  on Amazon.com.

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