Once you have made the decision to breastfeed your baby, you should know or at least be learning all the dos and don’ts that go along with it. A huge don’t is to introduce your newborn to bottles or binkies for the first four weeks minimum. You want to avoid these foreign nipples to prevent nipple confusion. This can make breastfeeding your new baby very difficult or for some, impossible. The baby may even end up preferring the bottle over your breast. It is very important to establish good nursing practices early on to better your chances of sticking with it. Nursing your baby isn’t just great for your child, but also has many health benefits for you too (I’ll post about that later).

Upon logging into my Facebook account today and looking through my news updates, I found a great link for all moms who are planning on breastfeeding. As a breastfeeding mom herself, she wanted everyone to know that bottles were not welcome in her baby’s mouth and came up with a creative way to get the message across. She has created baby hats with the logo “No Bottles, Please! I’m a Breastfed Baby!” They come in blue for boys, pink for girls as well as neutral colors for those that could actually hold out on knowing the sex of their baby.

Her whole idea is to help out nursing mothers and possible caregivers, such as the nurses at the hospital caring for your newborn in the nursery. Yes, these nurses are wonderful at their jobs and each and every mother greatly appreciates their watchful eyes over our new bundles of joy while we recover and get in that last uninterrupted nap before we are discharged from the hospital and the real roller coaster of motherhood truly begins. However, some don’t take the extra step to find out if baby is bottle or breast fed and sometimes this can result in baby ending up getting a bottle instead of the breast.

I had a very similar situation myself after having my son. Thank goodness he wasn’t given a bottle, but he was brought back to me from the nursery with a binky in his mouth. The binky was in fact enough to cause nursing issues for a couple days. No one asked me if I was nursing him or if I did or did not want binkies used. I would have loved to have had one of those hats for him to wear and get the message across for the both of us.

The only down fall of the hats is that they are a little spendy. Hats are $10.00 each plus $3.00 for standard shipping. On the flip side, keep in mind that the hats are also made by her and she has found a great way to make an income from home. Maybe she’ll branch out and start making onesies and nursing blankets all with her logo. I can see the possibilities of a future hit line of baby clothing and apparel right around the corner.