This Makes My Brain Hurt

We have a fabulous children’s museum here in town. No, not a museum about children or filled with stuffed children (ew!)…a glorious entertainment place FOR children. Where you can let your child roam free and be fairly confident they won’t topple a reconstructed dinosaur or leave their fingerprints on a priceless oil. Basically, someone took a giant building and filled it with crap that kids would love spend hours getting into (with an educational spin to make parents happy).

When Munchie was younger we spent a lot of time in the designated “Toddler Areas”…a lot of time. And, though I’ve never been bashful about nursing in public, I appreciate that they have a private space for mothers or nursing pairs who require more privacy. I even used it once when Munchie was in her highly distractable stage and would pop off to look around at the slightest movement or noise. A feeding in that busy environment would have lasted hours without a quiet corner.

While many more mothers are choosing to breastfeed their children, it seems bottles are so ingrained in our culture as the way that babies are fed, that even a giant sign for an area designated for nursing from breasts would have a giant bottle on it.

I’m far from a ‘Nursing Nazi.’ I did breastfeed Munchie well past a year and I do believe it is optimal nutrition for babies and beneficial in many other ways, but I get that folks formula feed or feed breastmilk via bottles occasionally/exclusively or any combination of nursing/breastmilk/formula/bottles. As long as a baby is fed, that’s really the important thing.

But regardless of where you fall on the spectrum, can we all agree that if you are using a room for nursing, a bottle probably isn’t involved? If the museum wanted to be as PC as possible and keep the bottle, then call it a feeding room and I’d have nothing to write about.  But to put use a bottle…it just hurts my brain every time I see it. I’m not saying they should have a breast on the sign, but, heck, the International Breastfeeding symbol is free to use.

Dear Museum, this symbol makes more sense for a sign on a breastfeeding room. And it’s free to use.

Granted this falls into the “trivial” category of “first world problems” but it makes my brain hurt, nonetheless.