How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane Read Online Free Page A

body, which is a gallery of horrors in comparison. There are so many problems with what’s below my belly button there’s not time enough to list it all (although if you’re familiar with the myth of Medusa, then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what it looks like inside my underwear). By default, my breasts were my best girls, and historically the first things to berevealed on a blind date, a game of strip poker, or during a sale at The Home Depot.
    There was no reason to believe that my breasts wouldn’t be up to the task of nourishing the new human that I (with a little help from the husband) had created. And oh, they were! Because after the epidural worked its rubber- legged magic, and after I took a breath and squeezed out that nine-pound, ten-ounce baby like I’d squeeze a watermelon seed through my fingers, the kid latched onto my nipple and nursed like she’d been doing it all her life (which, if you do the math, she had).
    I’m not sure if there does exist an actual “Mother of the Year” award-giving body, but if there is, I was well on my way to winning, if not a Lifetime Achievement Award, then at least a sweet Runner-Up Plaque.
    That is, until our one-week pediatrician appointment revealed that our perfect baby had lost 20 percent of her birth weight—double what was acceptable. “Failure to thrive,” he called it. Even though she was nursing every three hours, she was literally starving.
    My breasts were a bust. *
    The pediatrician suggested we switch to formula right way.
    Whoa, Dr. Cowboy! This is not my beautiful motherhood experience. I know what happens to children who don’t breast-feed. They become drug addicts, serial killers, and socialites. I know that Michael Jordan was breast-feduntil he was three and that Charles Manson was not breast-fed at all. But since I was two hundred years too late to locate a wet nurse, I conceded to give the child formula, but only until she had gained the requisite amount of weight. After that I was determined to breast-feed my baby for one year, minimum.
    It was suggested that I visit a lactation consultant by the name of Binky. If Binky wasn’t available, I was to see Corky. Those names are so real I don’t even have a joke worthy of them.
    We drove to Binky’s office in the San Fernando Valley, whereupon she proceeded to examine my breast-feeding technique. Her findings? What was coming out of my nipples was something closer to puffs of milk-scented air than actual milk. My supply “sucked.” That was the bad news. The good news is that it was the baby’s fault, not mine.
    The baby had a bad latch, which led to my breasts being engorged, which led to my milk supply drying up, which led to my sitting in a small windowless office while a grown woman named Binky milked me.
    That’s right. I was milked by a Binky.
    Binky grabbed my nipple and pinched it hard—I realize this sounds like porn for Teletubbies, but it was about as sexy as back acne, (i.e., not at all * ) .
    She grabbed my nipple and jammed it about twelve inches into the baby’s mouth. At that moment, the momentof my first proper latch, it became clear to me that my baby was part piranha. I’m not sure how I managed to conceive a child with the genes of a carnivorous freshwater fish from South America, but it seemed the only way to explain the excruciating pain.
    I stamped my foot on the floor repeatedly, mostly to keep myself from punching my baby in the face. (Truth is, I would never punch my baby. I may, however, wait until she’s fifteen years old and give her one retroactively. I’m fairly certain she’ll deserve it by then anyway.)
    Two hours and several hundred dollars later, Binky sent us away with a hospital-grade pump, which I was to use every three hours until my supply could match my daughter’s demand.
    When we got home, the husband bottle-fed the baby while I zipped on my hands-free