Week 33 of Pregnancy
Your baby is pretty close to being finished growing lengthwise, but it will do some serious beefing up over the next seven weeks. Many sites compare your baby to a pineapple now, which sounds like the most uncomfortable thing to be carrying in your body aside from maybe a ball of barbed wire and broken glass. Your soft, beautiful baby is around 17 inches long and about 4.5 lbs.
I also wanted to talk a bit about feeding your baby. Many people feel very strongly about bottle feeding and breastfeeding, but I wanted to write a quick top 5 list of the benefits of both options. Here goes:
Formula Feeding:
- Anybody can feed your baby and at 3am that’s really awesome
- You always know how much your baby is eating
- You can drink tequila or smoke peyote to your heart’s content
- You can wear anything because you don’t have to worry about boob access
Breast Feeding
- Technically speaking, it’s the way we’re designed to feed babies
- Nothing gets much cheaper than free (I’m not counting your time here.)
- Convenient and fast – you can never forget it at home and nothing silences a crying baby like an instant boob
- Your antibodies pass to the baby so it boosts their immune system
Now, you may already have a good idea of what you’d like to do once your baby is born but keep an open mind about this one. If you can breastfeed, I say give it a shot. If it doesn’t work out, don’t beat yourself up about it. Both are completely acceptable ways to feed your kid including a little bit of both (do I hear the shrill of a public health nurse screaming “nipple confusion!!”?)
Depending on where you live there will probably be pressured to do one or the other. I’ve read about women being asked to leave establishments because they were breastfeeding but I’ve also known people who peeled the labels off formula cans so they wouldn’t be ridiculed for bottle feeding.
I honestly believe there’s a special place in hell for people that make a woman feel like shit about the way she chooses to feed her child. Folks need to recognize that every woman wants what’s best for her baby and they aren’t helping the situation by adding to her doubt and fears. (Insert Little House on the Prairie type music here). I’ve done said what I feel is right. Go on now, be gone with ya.
If you’re looking to read more, here’s a link to my breastfeeding experience and one from New Mom on the Blog.
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