If they’d had this when Kate was nursing, we’d still be there. Happy hours for new moms!
Pamela Foster, who wore a black sweater and jeans, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, said she was happy just to be out of her pajamas.
“I’m sure I used to have interesting things to say, but I can’t remember,” she said wistfully as she nuzzled her baby, Duncan.
…Breast-feeding was another frequent subject, one that raised some potentially touchy questions. Would drinking a glass of wine adulterate the purity of mother’s milk and bring the child welfare authorities? Could the early exposure of an infant’s tabula rasa to drink encourage pernicious vices later in life? And what about the possibly hazardous combination of drinking and pushing a stroller?
I look at it this way: Sooner or later, every kid needs to learn how to mix a decent martini for mommy. Might as well start ’em early.
beth said on February 20, 2004 at 1:15 am
I won’t believe that this is true unless I see Miranda from Sex and the City there on the final episode! However, Americans have long been laughed at by Europeans for their Puritan attitudes towards alcohol, pregnancy, and breast-feeding. It does sound like fun!
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alex said on February 20, 2004 at 2:06 am
My mom didn’t breast feed�this was back in 1961�2�because she had a pack -a-day non-filtered Chesterfield habit and had to down hard liquor every night with the corporate crowd where my dad worked. And yet she carried me and my brother to term doing these same things. Same dif, I suppose.
Her habits hurt only insofar as she was incapable of getting up mornings to send us off to school on a full stomach.
I’d say the danger’s way overestimated. And I’m writing this as I’m crocked myself. It’s in the blood.
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beth said on February 20, 2004 at 2:22 am
I have pictures of my mom, drinking with me, in utero! These days, if I even look at a glass of wine, I am reminded that I have to drive within an eight hour period. Last Christmas, when we were 100% snowed in, without a chance of even plowing the driveway, she shot me nasty looks as I drank a glass of wine! By the way… a blizzard is NEVER the time to point out to your mother (with pictoral evidence) that she imbided while pregnant.
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Colleen said on February 20, 2004 at 8:32 am
I’ll chime in with a “me too”. My parents have a lovely slide of the Christmas dinner in 1966 where they announed they had another present that wouldn’t be there until summer. And there my mom sits, while my little cells divide, with an empty wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
And I was bottle fed. Think how smart I coulda been….
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Nance said on February 20, 2004 at 9:32 am
One of the many reasons I love our family doctor in Fort Wayne is his laid-back, long-view attitude toward things like this. He told me to go ahead an enjoy the occasional glass of wine while nursing, that it wouldn’t do either of us any harm, despite what the screeching health freakazoids claimed. One of the most tiresome members of my nursing moms’ support group — which didn’t meet in a bar, dammit — was the one who very ostentatiously claimed she wouldn’t even take a sip of communion wine at her church, because “we just don’t know” how it might affect her milk. (P.S. She had no such qualms about going on a crazy diet when her TWINS were about a month old. She’d been nursing both with no problems up until then, and just couldn’t make the connection between her subsequent problems with supply and her decision to limit her caloric intake to 1,000 a day.
As for drinking while pregnant: FAE and FAS is an entirely preventable birth defect and I’d never encourage anyone to tipple while gestating, but. Alcohol has been a part of human history pretty much since we figured out how to make it, and if it was as lethal to fetuses as some say, we’d all be drooling idiots. Dan Savage, the sex columnist who adopted a baby with his boyfriend a few years ago, said one reason they got the kid was because the mother, a street punk, drank moderately throughout her pregnancy. The yuppie couples who she contacted first didn’t want to take the chance. The baby was and remains fine.
Moderation, moderation, moderation.
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Lex said on February 20, 2004 at 11:08 am
Hear, hear! I’m gonna have my son start bringing me beer just as soon as he can open the fridge without help and grow teeth to take the cap off.
(Kidding. He’s actually about to turn 3 and has no trouble untwisting the cap.)
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ashley said on February 20, 2004 at 11:41 am
Moderation means binging only infrequently, but then, I’m from New Orleans. God, I miss those drive-thru daiquiri bars.
My wife still feels a twinge of guilt because she got loaded on 9/11…then found out a week later she was pregnant. If anything ever is excusable, that one is.
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