On How Much You Should Explain to a Three Year Old- Part Two

The first blog post in this series was meant to be sort of funny.

This one is meant to be more reflective.

As those who are acquainted with me already know, I am a big supporter of breastfeeding.

The stay at home mom circle I run with is pretty breastfeeding friendly. Contrary to national trends, almost all of my stay-at-home mom friends nurse or have nursed their kids. Even ones who would not identify as AP, for the most part, nurse their kids.

I try not to be to militant about breastfeeding, but it can be hard when you hear LLL leaders and friends telling you advocate, advocate, advocate. And they are right, you can't make breastfeeding the norm without normalizing the act.

In an attempt to normalize breastfeeding at our house I tried not to let my daughter play with bottles. Most that came with dolls got tossed in the garbage. Somehow, though, one slipped through the cracks. Incidentally, my daughter is in love with it. She started exclusively bottle feeding her "girls".

Then one day she told me one day that she was going to go to the store to get "baby milk".

I have no idea where that came from. We have always called breast milk "mama milk" and the kid can't possibly remember having a bottle since the last one she took was when she was, like, 3 weeks old.

I was at a loss. All the lactivists tell you to treat breastfeeding as the norm. I don't really want her to think that you can get baby milk from a store, I want her to think it comes from boobs. But, obviously, you can get formula from the store. So I told her that baby milk doesn't come from a store, it comes from mamas. Then I told her that some mamas can't feed their babies from their breasts so they buy baby milk from the store.

I kind of felt like I should tell her about donated breast milk or something or go into how formula marketing can be evil, but I refrained. I don't think her 3 year old mind can handle all that.

So, how do you treat bottles and dolls at your house?