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When I brought my youngest son home from hospital, I had three boys under the age of three, so I knew that there were going to be a number of challenges and issues to deal with because the two older boys were little more than babies themselves. However, I had breastfed the two older boys and was determined to feed the baby as well so the most important thing to do was to get feeding established as soon as possible while helping the older pair to realise that the new baby was not going to take away all their time and attention.
The most difficult thing initially was coping with the fact that my second little boy had only stopped feeding himself about six weeks before I brought the baby home. I was expecting a lot of jealousy from him because I expected him to think that breastfeeding had been his exclusive right. I have to say that he surprised me and coped really well. Every now and then he asked if he could have a feed and he did latch on a few times but got bored very quickly because he realised that it was much easier to play and drink milk at the same time if he used his cup, rather than depending on me for a feed.
My baby was small when he came home so he fed quite frequently which was challenging because the other two boys are extremely active. One of the most effective ways of keeping them busy while I was sorting out the baby was reading them stories from a special book that they were only allowed when I was feeding the baby. This meant that breastfeeding was a special time for them as well as the baby.
There are also a number of games that can be played quite easily by toddlers and are easy to supervise when you have one hand available and are trying to teach a new baby how to feed. These have proved to be a big hit with the boys because they feel quite grown up because they are playing 'big boy' games while the baby is eating, and they often point out that he is too small to join them so it makes them feel special.
One of the best ways that I have been able to keep both the boys busy is by using an invention that we created over summer. If we were out in our garden, we had a special bench that became our adventure bench. I would sit on it with the baby and the two boys and we would all close our eyes so that the bench could take us on an adventure. The boys usually decided where we were going to go and some days we would land on the moon, other days we would be in the woods down the road from us. Once we had arrived at our
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How to keep an older child busy while you're breastfeeding
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