GREAT NEWS- AOA GRANT APPROVAL!

I received some great news via email today. The AOA grant from the national medical honor society has been approved for BEST! I have been working on this grant for a little over a month and I am very encouraged to see that hard work pay off.

The grant will provide $2000 in funds for BEST for the year. We will use that money for items like instructional dvds, pamphlets, breastfeeding supplies, and to provide food for meetings at Seton Home.


As for the report from last meeting- our LLL speaker had to cancel last minute so we ended up talking about latching on and the mechanics of breastfeeding. Miranda and I found a great WIC DVD at the last minute that talked all about latching and showed some great examples. We had lower than usual attendance, partly because several girls are very busy with school right now and also because the "pregnancy cottage" seems to be less full than usual. There was one new resident to seton home who was very engaged in the dvd and very receptive to the information we provided. She said that she hadn't really understood "how it worked" until we showed the dvd but she seemed like she was planning to breastfeed once her baby is born. There were lots of "awws" during the video and I thought it was nice to see the residents getting excited about having their babies and breastfeeding.

We decided that the next meeting will be a holiday party theme. We are going to have tamales beans and rice, watch a "breastfeeding rap" and give the residents breastfeeding themed gifts like boppy pillows, breastfeeding covers (hooter hiders) and other supplies. It should be a great way to wrap of the year for BEST! We will start up our meetings again after new year's.

Mom's Place

I am back from thanksgiving break, refreshed and ready to press on with the BEST project! I am also REALLY EXCITED about sharing this awesome DVD (see pic) that I hope to share at a future BEST meeting...see more below.

While in Austin, I had a unique opportunity to learn about breastfeeding education and lactation support from the experts at Mom's Place. Mom's Place is part of one of the WIC clinics in Austin, and there is no other breastfeeding resource center like it in the whole state of Texas. WIC mothers can get free breastfeeding help at Mom's Place. While shadowing for the day, I saw one baby with a tongue tie, one baby who was having trouble feeding because her mom was making too much milk, and one mother whose baby was doing just fine and she only needed reassurance that her baby was healthy and gaining weight. I learned so much in 4 hours! Breastfeeding is such a special thing.

This week, the plan for BEST is to have a LLL speaker come talk to the mothers-to-be at Seton Home about nutrition for moms while breastfeeding, and we will surely end up taking about more as the meeting progresses. I have been enjoying the "organic nature" of the meetings, and I hope that casual feel will continue. Miranda and I both agree that it makes the participants seem more comfortable with sharing and asking questions.

Our menu plan for this week is Build-Your-Own-Salads. I hope the girls haven't been to spoiled by the fast food we've been bringing, because we are taking a turn this week towards the healthier foods. It's definitely a needed change...it has been bothering me that we are bringing fast food and soda and then at the same time trying to encourage a healthy lifestyle choice (breastfeeding). Hypocritical? I think so!

I have a great DVD from Mom's Place that we are going to clear with the Center and hopefully show in two weeks at our "holiday party" meeting. I love this DVD! It is a 10 minute rap-cartoon made by the African American Breastfeeding Alliance in UCLA which features a breastfeeding mom who knows all about the benefits that mothers milk has to offer. I think it's fun and also full of good facts, so I hope we get to use it at Seton Home.

I will update on Thursday to share the outcome of the next meeting.

Week 2

Our Second week of BEST has come and gone. The meeting went well. We watched a dvd that is basically an intro to breastfeeding. It was probably made at 4 or 5 years ago, yet the teens were convinced that it must be ancient. One girl asked me "miss, how old is this movie??"
There were a couple of new residents who hadn't been to our first meeting. Several girls who were there last week seemed to be happy to see us again. Also, the same resident who asked last week if she could restart breastfeeding after stopping for 2 days has continued to breastfeed! She is using both bottle and breastmilk and it is working well for her.
I was particularly happy to see more UTHSCSA faculty and students at this meeting. We had Dr. Berggren, Dr. Berggren's mom, a 4th yr medical student, and two 1st year medical students in attendance in addition to Miranda and I.
Overall the meeting was a nice casual conversation atmosphere and it allowed for some of the girls who are currently breastfeeding to share their personal experience with others who are pregnant.
This week, over thanksgiving break, I will be in Austin. I am using this opportunity to shadow my mother who is a lactation consultant for WIC in Austin, and I am also attempting to schedule a time to shadow a family educator who visits new moms in the hospital to encourage them to breastfeed. I am hoping to synthesize what I learn in these visits into a guide for students involved in the BEST project.
Now that we have consent forms set up for visiting the teens in the hospital, we just need to get them signed by the teens' parents/guardians. Soon we will have all the branches of the BEST program in place!

So impressed

I was so impressed with the maturity, appreciation, and willingness to participate that the girls at Seton Home showed at the first support group meeting on thursday.

The meeting started off with a prayer led by one of the girls. She thanked jesus for seton home and for her beautiful baby girl and for the guests (us) coming to talk to them. I am personally not someone who generally prays before meals, but I found this prayer to be a great reflective start to our meeting. Next, Miranda, Stephanie, and I shared pizza and cookies and talked with the girls for about an hour. We kept the discussion casual and allowed the girls to share their experiences and ask questions.

There were 4 moms who came to the meeting with their babies, and 6 girls who are currently pregnant. They have due dates ranging from this month to next march.

Of the moms who came with their babies, all but one are currently breastfeeding. The one mother who is not breastfeeding is 16 and just had her baby 2 weeks ago. She had been giving a bottle AND breastfeeding until 2 days ago when she began giving the bottle exclusively. She said in the meeting that she didn't know why she stopped. At the end of the meeting, after we had discussed many of the benefits of breastfeeding with the girls, she asked us, "so...if I decide to start breastfeeding again after 2 days of not doing it, will I still have enough milk?" We assured her that her milk would increase to meet her babies demand since it had only been a couple of days. Perhaps she will breastfeed her little one a little longer! I felt like that was a great start to the first support group meeting.

It was such a soothing, positive environment with the girls who are already moms sharing their thoughts and stories with the girls who are soon-to-be moms. Two moms were breastfeeding during the meeting. so cool!

It appears as though we have some work to do by encouraging the Hospital where these girls give birth to be more "baby-friendly" ie more supportive of breastfeeding. One girl shared her experience that a nurse gave her baby a bottle in the nursery because he was fussy, despite her insisting that he not get any bottles or pacifiers. How frustrating!

I am hopeful that we will continue to get a good response from the Seton Home girls, and that we can get more students from UTHSCSA involved in the next support group meeting. Thursday was a great start and made me excited to go back.

Gluing down the pieces

This may be the first blog post about the BEST (Breastfeeding Education and Support for Teenage mothers) project, but the wheels have been turning for many months to get to this point. Since I first heard of this project's concept last July, there have been many meetings, emails and brainstorm sessions involving many helpful folks to get to where we are today.

Two weekends ago, Seton Home hosted a training session on breastfeeding management with 2 nursing students, ~15 medical students, and 5 Seton Home staff in attendance. This Thursday Miranda and I will hold the first BEST support group meeting with real live teenage moms and teenage moms to be. The wheels are definitely turning.

And while all of this action is definitely exciting, it is also nervewracking. See, I've never much liked "gluing down the pieces". I love planning projects and micromanaging every angle, but I cringe at the idea of letting the plan come to fruition. Because once things are "glued down" there is no going back.

I can remember having this problems as far back as elementary school, when I was assigned to research culture and art from the 1920's and make a poster of my findings. Researching was the easy part; I found several pictures in books, made copies and cut them out. I wrote descriptions to go with each picture. But then... Oh I could not bring myself to glue the pieces to the poster board! I spent hours arranging and rearranging, adding construction paper as borders and then changing my mind. I suppose you could say I have *ahem* perfectionist tendencies.

So now that the BEST project is on a roll with months worth of momentum, I am having a lot of trouble. What if the meeting isn't perfect on Thursday? What if we don't reach all of the teens? What if the grants I am submitting don't receive funding? Shouldn't I spend just a little more time tweaking this or that to make sure everything is just right?

...




Ok, no more tweaking, it's time to glue down the pieces!