Today my blogging from the other day about my current breastfeeding difficulties was noted by one of my very favorite journalists, Lisa Belkin in her own Motherlode blog in the New York Times.

As someone who has been an outspoken advocate of breastfeeding for a number of years, was scary for me to admit publicly that I am having to formula-feed Baby G. I was afraid people would call me a big fat hypocrite – and a few have – just as I was afraid for a long time to tell anyone that my child had a serious drug problem because I was afraid people would blame the attachment parenting style of baby-care that I’ve written about (and lived). But I felt like I needed to be as honest as possible about the problems I have had breastfeeding this time because so many people have been so supportive and kind as I’ve shared our family’s story so far. I may not share every detail of my life as a mother (I chose to remain mum on Henry’s struggles for several years before I spoke publicly about it) but when I do decide to open up about something in particular, I am going to tell the truth. And the truth is that I can’t seem to make nursing work this time because there’s no milk.

(As an aside, in case you wondered, Henry was formula-fed.)

The fact that I am unable to breastfeed my baby this time around doesn’t diminish my belief in the critical infant-maternal health benefits of breastfeeding for populations of women and babies. But my current experience has certainly offered me yet another perspective on the complexities of mothering in general. If only breastfeeding and bed-sharing COULD prevent addiction in teenagers. God how I wish that were true. But they don’t. And neither do spanking, letting babies cry it out, or vegetarian diets or cloth diapers or the right brand of infant formula or a more expensive stroller or two-parent homes or the perfect child spacing or…or…or

Read all about it over in my latest Babble blog post.

I was pretty shocked to discover today that there is an ad for a particular brand of infant formula running in the BlogHer ad space over there to your left. I thought I had opted out of any WHO Code non-compliant advertising when I joined the BlogHer ad network. I’ve had this problem before, but thought it was fixed.

Off to contact BlogHer to get this glitch remedied ASAP.

Why do I care whether there are ads for formula running on my blog? Here’s why:

The Milky Way of Doing Business

The Story of the Who Code, and Why It Matters

Formula for Disaster

I was happily surprised to see that one of my blog posts of the last year was included in the list of Best Breastfeeding Blogs and Blog Posts of 2009 by the blog PhD in Parenting.

And that got me to thinking about the fact that I will once again be breastfeeding a baby in 2010, almost TWENTY YEARS after I became a mama for the first time, to my sweet baby H, who is now 18 years old and a high school grad. I only nursed H for a few weeks, because I had no idea what I was doing and I got superbad medical advice on HOW to nurse my baby. But I did breastfeed him. I then nursed J between 1995 and 1999 (Yes, that’s four years. What can I say? The kid liked to nurse!), and E between 1998 and 2001. Then I breastfed C for 13 months between 2007 and 2008. And now I’ll be a breastfeeding mother again, for the last time.

That’s a whole lot of breastfeeding! It’s definitely been one of the most gratifying, enjoyable parts of motherhood for me. The only parts I did not enjoy were the few bouts with mastitis that I had over the years, nursing J while pregnant with E (HATED nursing while pregnant and probably wouldn’t do it again unless I were pregnant but also still had a nursling under 12 months of age), and the godawful experience of pumping as a full-time working mother, which I dealt with for the first time with C.

I have to admit that I am already truly dreading the pumping part of breastfeeding this time around. As I’ve blogged before, my extreme hatred of everything about pumping gave me a deeper understanding of how strongly felt some women’s dislike is for breastfeeding itself. I assume that the women who tell me that they just hated nursing sort of feel the way I feel about pumping. Pumping was a very humbling experience for me. I used a Medela Pump in Style last time, which many women find to work great, but I think that this time I will either cough up the $$$ for another brand of high-end consumer-grade pump, like the Avent Isis (have any of you tried this one?), or I may even rent a hospital grade pump like the Medela Lactina (have any of you used one of these as a working mom pump?). Maybe with a breastpump that I like better, it won’t be so bad. Maybe. I hope. I also now have a job with a more predictable schedule and an office of my own with a door that locks, which wil be a lot easier than trying to find time to leave a busy newsroom and go hide in some out of the way, freezing spot in the building to try to pump. So that will certainly be an improvement.

But even so, I am not looking forward to that part of working while mothering a baby. Maybe some of you can relate.

There has been a lot of discussion in recent months about the impact that the very recent mass adoption & use rate of Facebook and Twitter is having – or will have - on “old school” blogs, like this one.

Since I’ve been blogging regularly at the same domain (two, actually, but they both point here) for about seven years now, I think I have a pretty good body of anecdotal data with which to consider the ramifications to traditional blogs and bloggers from the social media tipping point that arrived in the past 18 months, you know, when seemingly EVERYBODY IN AMERICA  suddenly joined Facebook, Twitter and Linked In.

Here are my observations, from my own blogging experience, as well of from my actual blog analytics, which I’ve observed over the years:

• Post Facebook/Twitter tipping point, I find that I am more likely to take an interesting idea and use it as a pithy, quick hit on Facebook or Twitter rather than turn it into an actual blog post.  As a result, my blog is now less  “sparkly,” for lack of a better way to put it.  My personality, humor and day-to-day activities now seem to end up in my Facebook and Twitter status udates  (friend me on both!), while my actual blog posts these days tend to be more like short form essays, dealing with more high-concept topics and issues.  And that’s not necessarily a good thing in terms of my blog being the primary platform where people actually get to know me.  However, to be fair, that shift over time in the tone and content of my blogging here isn’t entirely due to Twitter and Facebook.   In my own case, as a very early-adopter “mommyblogger” who has been doing this a long time,  some of that evolution away from so much “here’s the funny thing or the really painful thing that happened with Katie and her kids today” blogging has come as H, J and E – the “blogged about” -  have gotten older.  They now have vetting power over any blogging I ever do that references them in any way.  And although they have generally enjoyed having a mom who is a writer/blogger (or at least they have enjoyed the food and shoes that the writing has paid for over the years), they are no longer okay much/most of the time with me relating some specific, funny thing  that one of them says at the dinner table.   At age 4 or 7, they didn’t care.  As middle schoolers and teenagers, they do.  And I totally understand that.  So as the big kids in the family have gotten older, I have also become more cognizant of the fact that at a certain point, their childhood stories are THEIRS to tell, in whatever way and to whomever THEY choose.  If I am the only one telling these stories – via my blog or through essays published elsewhere – and I do it before they ever get a chance to run their own memories  of our family life through the sepia sieve of hindsight, they will never get a chance to remember things, or tell things in their own way.  I want all four of my children to one day sit around a table together, laughing and sharing memories of their childhoods and our home life,  debating who is remembering this Christmas morning mishap or that day at the beach correctly.  I don’t want my blogging to replace their memories to such a degree that they don’t have those wonderful, “remember when” conversations that adult siblings have together. Of course, C is still young enough that I can exploit her for commercial gain for a good long time yet before she objects (I kid! I kid!) While I do believe that all of the writing I have done (and will still do) about our lives together will one day offer a wonderful adjunct for their own memories – a sort of digital scrapbook or diary – I never want it to replace what they remember and believe and want to talk or write about.  So yeah, Twitter and Facebook HAVE changed my blog’s content, but they aren’t the whole impetus behind those changes over time.

• In the past 18 months – since Twitter and Facebook hit the big time – my blog’s traffic (meaning how many visitors I get and how often they visit) has remained steady or grown, but my comments have dropped DRASTICALLY.  This is the biggest impact that Facebook in particular has had on my blog. I used to routinely get dozens of comments on most blog posts.  Lately, I am lucky if I get 5-10.  I can see from my analytics that more people are visiting my blog year over year, and are hanging around and reading multiple posts, and then returning for more on a regular basis. But my blog readers are now much more silent.  Very few comments.  I believe that this is almost entirely due to Facebook. The people who used to chat with others or debate things or talk about what I’d blogged that day in the comments below each of my blog posts now have those conversations on Facebook instead.  In fact, when I publish a new post here at this blog, a link to it automatically goes to my Facebook wall (I use Networked Blogs for this).  I can see from my traffic stats that lots  of people are indeed following the Facebook link and coming here to the blog to read the post.  That’s the good part of Facebook’s impact on my blog; the bad part is that they then wait until they get back to Facebook to talk about the post, and they do it in the comments below the link to my blog post…on Facebook.  I love hearing from people about what I write – whether that’s here on the blog or over at Facebook.  But I do really miss having a volume of comments here that made my blog feel more like a real community than it does currently.  With all of the comments on my content happening over at Facebook,  my blog – which is very dear to me after years of sharing my life here with readers who have held my hand through good times and bad – feels a little dead, a little empty. And that really does bother me.  It’s not that I want more comments for the pageviews they generate – I am getting plenty of pageviews  – but post-Facebook tipping point, my readers are sort of silent here at the blog.  They come and go without saying hello,  sharing their own stories,  or telling me who they are and how they found the blog. I even miss some of the “heated” (that’s one way to put it!) disagreements among readers that were a common occurrence back in the day (the day being all of the years I blogged up until 2009.  And yes, I do blame Facebook  for that. Damn you, Facebook, and your comment-sucking ways!

• Traffic growth for my blog in the past 8 months-12 months in particular has been primarily driven by Twitter and Facebook,  rather than by search engines.  I used to get A WHOLE LOT more blog traffic from search engine queries, some of them very bizarre (You don’t want to know some of them. Ick. So disturbing to look at one’s blog analytics and realize what people are out there searching for.)  In fact, some of my favorite longtime readers/commenters originally found me when they typed something into Google or Yahoo or even AskJeeves (yes, I have been blogging for THAT LONG!)  that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Example: What do I do when my child’s pet Python escapes and is loose in the house?”  But the search query somehow landed them here, at this blog. And then they stayed, and then they came back again and again.  And then many of them started joining in the conversation in the comments below my posts.  But lately, my search engine traffic is down precipitously, while my referrals from Twitter and Facebook status updates and wall posts – my own and those from other people referencing me or my blog – are up to a huge degree.  When I get some free time (ha!), I need to sit down, and with Jon’s help, try to figure out what’s going on with the SEO issue on my blog, because the change has been incredibly dramatic over the past year.  I want to figure out if there is any clear correlation between Facebook’s explosion and the fact that it appears to me that fewer people are searching for topics that used to be the bread and butter of my search engine traffic – things like breastfeeding advice, co-sleeping stories, etc – the kinds of search queries that used to be a huge driver of women and moms to my blog.  My suspicion is that women are now simply asking these sorts of questions in their status updates, and then letting the info come to them via their network of friends and friends-of-friends on Facebook.  Instead of going out to find the info, they are attracting the info they need directly to them from people they already trust and “know,” at least to some degree. That sort of high-influence information carries much more weight with a woman wanting to know what high chair she should buy than some blog post that I – a complete stranger – wrote about my preferred high chair brand, and which she then found with a totally impersonal Google search.

So those are a few of my observations regarding how Facebook and Twitter are impacting my blog and my blogging.  I’d be really interested to hear from other bloggers – particularly those of you who have been at it for more than two or three years.

You can leave your thoughts, ideas and observations in…..the comments below

This is really fascinating. The NYT Freakonomics bloggers argue that early weaning from the breast is significantly impacting the declining number of females among India’s overall population:

Stanford’s Seema Jayachandran and Princeton’s Ilyana Kuziemko argue that a preference for boys tempts mothers to wean daughters significantly sooner than their sons.

The earlier they wean, the earlier they can again conceive and roll the dice that this time it’ll be a boy.

Meanwhile, the weaned daughters have been deprived of the health benefits breast-milk and nursing may provide and are more vulnerable to illness and death, particularly in the developing world where the study is focused.

The authors conclude that the “breastfeeding factor” accounts for 14 percent of India’s “missing girls.” More boys survive infancy than girls.

From my latest post over at my Babble Home/Work blog:

There was certainly a period, during the second half of the 90s and the early part of this decade, when the discourse regarding breastfeeding was somewhat reactionary. What I mean is that after many decades of information suppression and misrepresentation, a lot of women were, well – for lack of a better way to put it – kind of pissed off when we realized that as a group, we’d been misinformed, manipulated, dismissed and even lied to regarding this important and meaningful element of infant-maternal health.

We were really irritated to find out that, despite what we, our mothers and grandmothers before us had been told by the “experts,” we actually COULD breastfeed our babies successfully, and that we DID make “enough milk.” We found out that infant formula ISN’T “just like” human milk, and that women all over the world DO nurse beyond infancy. (That was a real eye opener.) In short, we discovered that the medical profession we trusted, along with infant formula manufacturers and marketers, had sold us a bill of goods about something that really mattered to us, and to our children.

Our generational response to this discovery came in the form of an unprecedented tidal wave of new articles, books, websites, online communities, organizations, and academic/medical research on the topic of breastfeeding, all within a period of only one decade. Our frustration became consciousness raising, which became empowerment and productivity, and I think it’s fair to say that those of us who were among that particular group of “lactivist” moms fundamentally and forever changed the dialogue on breastfeeding in America.

Some of us played a role as writers, while others of us were Web developers, doctors, nurses, academics, midwives, peer counselors, lactation consultants and activists. In the course of only about one decade, this group of women – early adopters and very effective users of what is now called social media – built on the pioneering work of La Leche League and others – and in doing so, we successfully reclaimed an important part of motherhood for ourselves, and for our daughters. We changed laws, we changed workplaces, and we sparked a process of significant and ongoing change in the way medical practitioners learn about breastfeeding. (Hells yeah, we did!)

Read the whole thing.

Big props to Knox County Commissioner (and my neighbor) Amy Broyles for introducing a resolution that supports the modest and reasonable accommodations that our county employees who also happen to be nursing mothers need on the job.

Better support for working, nursing moms means more Knox County babies will be breastfed, and breastfed longer, meaning a healthier community for all of us. It also makes Knox County more competitive in attracting and retaining top-notch female employees. It’s win-win for Knox County employees, and for us as taxpayers.

Go Amy!

If you are a Knox Countian, be sure to let your own county commissioner know that you support Amy’s fiscally wise and health-promoting resolution.

Reading about the arrest of this woman, on charges that she was “drinking while breastfeeding” really got my hackles up.

And that’s what I’m blogging about over at Babble today.

It has come to my attention that infant formula ads are occasionally showing up in my BlogHer adspace, over there to your left. I’ve never actually seen this, but I am told that it’s happening.

I am working on making sure that it stops happening ASAP. In the meantime, please accept my apologies. As I hope anyone who has followed my writing knows, I am a longtime, vocal supporter of The WHO Code , and I would never willingly have such an ad on any site I own or oversee.

So, yeah, I am working on this issue. Bear with me. And thanks to those readers who have alerted me to the problem.

And also, for the record, I sure wish that the PR and marketing firms that send me pitches, asking me to review or promote their client’s products on this blog would at least take a quick look-see at the contents and general editorial themes here before hitting send. If they did, they wouldn’t waste their time, their clients’ money or my email inbox space asking me to blog about things like a great new brand of infant formula or their client’s revolutionary, abstinence-based sex-ed program for teenagers…

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