Today I have another guest blogger - YAY - Sinead from UK website BreastfeedingMums. I wanted to showcase someone from the UK as a reminder that
Breastfeeders Anonymous will soon be available in the UK from
http://www.preciousbundle.com/ This is Sinead's gorgeous pic below with her beautiful son. Sinead, like moi, is VERY PASSIONATE about breastfeeding and decided to start a website to help others in their breastfeeding efforts. Below she tells us a bit more... Thanks Sinead.
Breastfeeding Mums came about as a result of my decision to become a work at home mum after the birth of my third child. I had successfully breastfed both of my daughters and having attended a local breastfeeding support group whilst breastfeeding my second daughter, I realised that there was so much information new breastfeeding mums wanted to know but that they just didn’t know where to find the answers.
At that point I realised I could help in so many ways.
Having qualified and worked as an English teacher for several years before becoming a parent, I knew I had the necessary skills to put together informative and useful articles that would guide and inform breastfeeding women and so I got to work; the result was my website.
Almost immediately I began receiving thank you emails from mums who’d come across my site and who had found the help they needed (for example, should a breastfed baby be winded during feeds, is it safe for a breastfeeding mother to drink alcohol, is it possible to restart breastfeeding after stopping?) and that spurred me on to keep writing more and more articles.
As time went by I also added a lot of pregnancy articles to the site as I began to understand that I needed to reach pregnant women too if I was to get the breastfeeding message across. This has been a very successful move and many of my most popular articles are those which are pregnancy-related.
BreastFeedingMums helps many new mothers cope with the demands of breastfeeding and I love the fact that I have helped mums simply by taking time to recall and write about the questions I heard mums asking time and again throughout my own time as a breastfeeding mum.
Aside from the website, I started the BreastfeedingMums Blog (
http://breastfeedingmums.typepad.com/) initially as a way of publicising my website. However, it also serves very much as a lovely keepsake of my own breastfeeding memories and my attempts at building up a successful and useful website.
The funny thing is the more I add to the website and blog, the more I realise there still is to do!
In the last few weeks I’ve begun podcasting some of the articles from the website as a means of making my articles more accessible to women who perhaps don’t have the time or privacy to sit down and read the articles and also for women with disabilities who perhaps find it difficult to read articles on a computer screen.
I’m also currently writing a book about my experiences which I hope will also help mums who are finding breastfeeding challenging.
On top of all that I have several other top-secret projects up my sleeve which will be revealed in the very near future!
I can honestly say I have learnt so much from my own personal breastfeeding experiences, not least the fact that I went from being virtually computer illiterate to feeling perfectly comfortable doing all manner of technical stuff these days! More than anything though I feel thrilled that I am now attracting around 1000 visitors a day via the website and blog… and if my advice helps even a tiny percentage of my visitors then all the late nights and hard work will have been well worth it.
If I’d gone back to teaching (which I may in the future) not only would I have missed out on the privilege and freedom of working from home whilst my children are small, but my life would be so different now. I truly feel that the choices I have made have been for the best.
