A Personal Account of Breastfeeding in the Great Outdoors
My first experiences with outdoor breastfeeding took place when our oldest daughter was in her first few months of life. She was a spring baby, and when summer rolled around my husband and I were happy to sit outside at a restaurant or café to enjoy a meal or a snack, and the little one enjoyed her own snack along with us. Hers was ideally packaged, always the right temperature and composition, with no fuss or muss necessary to settle her down to her drinking while my husband and I rested and conversed. Any looks I got for breastfeeding in such locations were exclusively positive: mostly women, but occasionally also men – likely fathers themselves, I thought, because most men did not seem to recognise that I was breastfeeding at all – would look on with smiles in their eyes.
As she grew older, and correspondingly more active, there were fewer and fewer opportunities to sit peacefully breastfeeding in a café, and breastfeeding in the “Great Outdoors” took the form more of a small sip here and there between playing in the sand and playing on the swings, or a longer drink and cuddle when she had fallen down and skinned a knee. In her second and third summers, nursing during the day was done mostly just to touch base with me again before going off on her own adventures. The serious nursing, done to fill an empty stomach, normally occurred just before going to sleep at night, just after waking in the morning, and normally a few times in between. Since we always slept in the same bed together, or later with her on her own mattress right beside mine, breastfeeding in this way was never a problem; neither of us really had to wake up for it.
The first time we started rock climbing again after having children was a little more than four years ago. By this time, our eldest daughter was seven, the middle daughter two and a half, and the youngest only there in our hearts and imaginations. By this time, several of our climbing friends also had children, and we all went away together for a family climbing weekend. This was a small adventure into the “Great Outdoors,” although we stayed in a Matratzenlager, a kind of hostel, which was only a few hundred metres away from the bus stop, with the climbing area less than a kilometre further down the road. The middle daughter was the youngest of the climbers, decked out in her ballet suit with a full-body harness over it; she was the oldest of the breastfed children on that trip. She missed the big multi-pitch route to the very top on the second day, because she had fallen asleep while taking a breastfeeding break in a shady spot under a tree. But this still is a pretty tame, civilized sort of outdoor adventure with a breastfeeding child. The hard-core outdoor breastfeeding really took place after our third daughter arrived.
By the time our youngest was born, we had become a rock-climbing family. We had even been climbing a few times (including a lovely week in the Ardèche in the south of France) while I was pregnant, but on these occasions I did no climbing myself because I considered it too risky, and was active only on belay (securing my husband, who did the lead climb: he put in his protection as he went, and then set up a “top rope” for the girls to tie into for their climbing adventures up the wall).
So far, though, we had taken climbing holidays only in locations where we would come back to the holiday house after a visit to the grocery store for supplies at the end of the day. When the youngest was about 18 months old, the first breastfeeding adventures in the real outdoors happened: we took a climbing trip in Appenzell. Our Berggasthaus (mountain hotel) could be reached only on foot after a long, steep hike. Each of the bigger girls (our two plus a friend of the eldest) had a rucksack of her own with a sleeping bag, a flask of water, some clothes, a toothbrush and her own climbing helmet. My husband had a huge rucksack filled with climbing gear. I had a large rucksack with a week’s worth of lunches for six (breakfast and supper would be eaten at the Gasthaus), a few spare bits of clothing, sleeping bags, and toothbrushes. On my front was a baby sling, from which my youngest enjoyed the trip up the hill. In the sling, she could breastfeed when she wanted to: I simply had to wiggle my hand in to pull up my shirt and open the nursing bra, and she would do the rest. We had quite a long walk up the hill, but it was really worth it in the end. The climbing up there was wonderful! It was on limestone, which I normally do not like because it has been made smooth and slippery by so many sweaty hands. In this case, though, the limestone had a lot of friction, because the need to hike for a few hours to reach the climbing had deterred many climbers who otherwise would have been alongside us each day.
As I write this piece, my family and I are in the process of planning our summer vacation for this year: we are heading off to the wilds of British Columbia, Canada, my home, with an expedition tent (quite old by now and nominally a three-person tent, but a spacious one so it should fit our family of five), a camp stove, our sleeping bags, our climbing gear, and some clean clothes. We will pack ourselves into a rented car and head out, camping wherever we find a place for the night, staying a few days where we find the climbing is good, and otherwise just enjoying ourselves. The youngest is still breastfeeding, but because she weighs almost 11 kg, I will no longer be able to carry her in the sling over long stretches to hike out to more remote climbing locations. We will probably save a trip like that for next year, when she will be going on four and able to hike for a few hours. Time will tell if she will still be breastfeeding by then, but even so, with breastfeeding I need pack nothing extra into my already-too-heavy rucksack.
By Beth Brupbacher
Beth grew up an hour’s drive outside of Squamish, B.C., Canada; a world-renowned rock climbing area. It was there, 20 years ago, that she learnt the ropes of rock climbing from the Swiss man who would later become her husband. Beth is a La Leche League leader and runs monthly LLL meetings in Meilen.
