Ah, my days of twiddling are long gone. Yet I still remember them with a little exasperation. My daughter nursed for a good long time. At first, we were desperate to begin. It seemed like my milk would never come in. Then we had latch issues. She lost weight, we pumped and supplemented. Nursing was such a struggle at the beginning. Yet by the end of six months, we were champion nursers. Heck, we could nurse upside down and backwards if we had to – well, at least we could nurse in all sorts of crazy positions that I never thought possible at the beginning.
Around the time my daughter was born, I remember watching a friend’s daughter nursing while hanging upside down off the back of the couch. She walked around her mother’s head while nursing and fiddled with her mother’s shirt. Like all things baby, I thought that my friend’s daughter was unduly acrobatic. This would never happen to me, I thought. Of course it did.
When my daughter was getting close to 9 months old, she decided that it would be fun to play catch with my other nipple while nursing. Now, this is something that we don’t talk about in polite company, isn’t it? However, any mom who has nursed a baby or an older toddler has likely experienced acrobatics or twiddling to a greater or lesser degree. Some don’t mind. Me? Well, it irritated me no end.
Now, I value the fact that my daughter loves to be close to me, and I love the fact that my body can provide her with comfort. However, there is a balance between my daughter’s need to be comforted and my stress with her activities. Twiddling made me irritated, and I didn’t want to transmit feelings of irritation to my daughter when we were nursing. I looked for gentle solutions. For those of you who have a twiddler but plan to continue to nurse for a while, how can you deal with the habit?
1. If you can, address the issue before it becomes one. With a newborn, move your baby’s hand onto her own body while she is nursing. That way, she will not learn how to fiddle with your nipples or clothing.
2. Decide what degree of nursing acrobatics or twiddling you can deal with. Any sort of fiddling drove me absolutely crazy, so I decided that I had to resort to zero tolerance or I would begin to resent and avoid nursing. Since nursing was something that we both valued, I wanted to find a way to make it work for us.
3. I addressed the issue by removing my daughter’s hand when she nursed. Sometimes I would hold her hand. Sometimes I would place it on the outside of my shirt. When she lifted her hand again, I would slowly remove it. I would also tell her that I preferred that she place her hand outside my shirt because fiddling hurt me.
4. I also cut her fingernails short. When she did twiddle and fiddle, it didn’t hurt.
5. I worked on giving her other things to hold. These ranged from my shirt to a nursing necklace, a small stuffed animal, and a squeezy ball. While you do run the risk of having your child become very attached to that object, it’s worth a try.
Do you have a fiddler? How have you addressed this?