I'm the Wiz

Last night Eric and I went to a breastfeeding class. Eric was on the phone with his mother earlier in the day and when he told her this she found the idea of taking a class for this sort of thing perplexing, but from everything we've heard breastfeeding is a learned skill for the mother, so we continued in the spirit of over-preparation and headed over to class.

The class was 3 1/2 hours long and featured a lot of talking, a slideshow*, a video and hands-on practice with dolls.

The video was definitely a highlight. It was made by the Royal College of Midwives in the UK and featured a bunch of nursing moms sitting around talking with a midwife about their experiences breastfeeding. They were all extremely British (awful teeth, many fewer chins than women, bulging eyeballs) and one woman in particular looked as though rather than brushing her hair for the video she had let a baby tiger maul her head.

One lengthy section of video showed the midwife coaching a new mom to get her newborn latched on and suckling.

"OK, you've got him all lined up, elicit the gape, now wiz!" She instructed the woman. "Wiz" seemed to mean "quickly get that baby onto your boob now!" based on when and how she was using it.

But the woman was having a hard time getting it all to come together. So they repeated the process again and again on the video, and each time at the critical moment...
"Wiz!" urged the midwife.
"Wiz!" she pressed, still upbeat.
"Come on - wiz!" endlessly encouraging.

I warned Eric that if he tries to tell me to "wiz" while we're getting Belvedere going on the breastfeeding, I'll probably just pee.


*The teacher is an old-school midwife and still uses old-school slides. Like with a projector. She worked with Sergey Brin and his wife when they had their baby last year and said he gave her no end of grief for using slides in this day and age. Apparently, even he couldn't shame her into modernizing.