It's been almost a month since nourish launched and it's been a whirlwind! After I passed my exam and became an IBCLC I thought the hard work was done, I might have an extensive knowledge of feeding babies, but that's about where my that's where my expertise ends with setting up a new service, I clearly had no idea of the amount of work that gets put into small businesses! I would like to thank the people who have supported me with this new venture, you all know who you are and without you, this website wouldn't be up, I would be quadruple booking myself and who knows what other chaos would be occurring! I am so grateful for support in navigating me through this.
Where would I be without other people telling me where to go??!!! Probably somewhere in Bolivia I reckon. I'm pretty terrible at reading maps, I get completely confused and lost, I generally find where I need to go by stopping and asking lots of people along the way, even with new technology I still need to do this. I was telling a friend of mine, who is a pilot, about this while we were walking back from the pub on a very starry night. I had asked if she knew what any of constellations of the stars were and if pilots use them to navigate, I wondered if it was a 'turn right after the one that looks a bit like a saucepan' type situation. Apparently it's not, which is quite good considering the British cloud.
Anyway, she told me a story about a pilot who was flying a passenger airline over the pacific once, he picked up on his radio an SOS call from a small plane that had got lost near to them, but it was unknown where. The passenger airline pilot was able to rescue the small plane and direct them to safety.
I've looked up this story, mostly because we had a rum in the pub and my memory of it was hazy, but it's even more amazing than I remembered. So, the small plane (a Cessna 188 for anyone into them) pilot's navigating system stopped working over the pacific. I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been, staring out the window and only seeing blue, with no idea where he was, no landmarks, no ships, nothing to see. He put out an SOS and an Air New Zealand passenger flight was the only plane anywhere near that could help at all.
Luckily the pilot was a navigator, there was also another navigator on board and together, with the small plane pilot, they used some extremely creative methods, including the sun setting, some mad radio working or not working thing, passengers on the plane as look outs and working out the location of an oil rig being towed so they could find the little plane.
At one point the pilot of the small plane said he wanted to ditch into the sea, which would have been the end for him, but the passenger airline pilot encouraged him to keep going, which he did. When one thing didn't work, they tried another, they kept trying and trying and after flying for over 20 hours, the plane was guided to safety. Literally mind-blowing.
You know when they say people seem to get younger and younger in professions?!
I love this story, not only is it about a really awesome rescue, but also because it shows such compassion, determination and skill in the face of a really scary situation.
Something that is so relatable in breastfeeding support. Okay, we aren't guiding planes running out of fuel across the Pacific, but we are certainly guiding women running out of energy through very tricky, confusing times.
Next possible location of Kim Crawfurd when travelling from Birmingham to Bristol.
When I had my first baby, 8 years ago, I can remember clearly feeling like I should really know what I was doing. I had just qualified as a health visitor and had done a couple of days of training, obviously this didn't make me an expert but surely I wasn't completely clueless?! When little B started crying for hours, feeding constantly, then projectile vomiting, had green poos and milk was literally pouring out of my breasts, I felt a little lost. In fact, I felt a lot lost.
I had the most amazing network of people around me, my husband was mega supportive, my mum was great, my sister was on the phone daily, I had friends who had babies the same age, but no one had a clue what was going on. I asked my health visitor who didn’t seem to think it was a huge problem. I googled a lot, bought a book and still felt none the wiser.
Then one day, I stumbled upon KellyMom, an American breastfeeding website. It was really helpful in dealing with my oversupply of milk which made me feel a lot better. I spoke to a friend who is a nurse, who told me she thought my baby had reflux and she would just go to the GP. I spoke to the GP who gave me some medication for reflux and this helped so much until my mad oversupply got sorted. When my mum said she saw my baby smile for the first time at 9 weeks I felt so relieved, but what a couple of months that was. It took weeks of research, problem solving, speaking to various people to even to begin to understand what was happening. It was so hard to enjoy the early days of motherhood.
This woman is almost certainly googling 'how to make baby sleep'.......
Looking back, if I had been able to access breastfeeding support, in the form of a group like Valley Feeding Friends (the free breastfeeding support group I run) with an experienced breastfeeding counsellor or IBCLC, I would have had all that support in one place, I wouldn’t have been stumbling around google images of baby poo at 4am and would have been 100x more confident and happier. At the time I hadn’t even heard of an IBCLC, there were no support groups locally and so this wasn’t really an option for me.
The reason I became a peer supporter was due to this lack of local support. My driving force behind wanting to become an IBCLC was because I wanted to have as much knowledge as I could, to support women as much as possible.
I've begun to think of IBCLC’s as like that pilot so skilled in navigation. Knowledgeable in an area that people might have seen and heard of, but don’t really know intricately, like he knew about the magnetic heading of the sun (just for the record, I have no idea what this is), we know about ducts and Montgomery tubercules!
The pilot had to assess from afar, IBCLC's do this constantly in video calls, phone calls and emails. When we can get up close, we can think beyond what you can see from the naked eye and understand what is really happening for that person and infant.
Joining peer support groups can really help when you are working through breastfeeding issues.
And just like the pilots, we're not perfect and magical, sometimes it takes time to work out where you are, not everything is obvious and has landmarks you recognise. With us, often it takes multiple conversations, more than one assessment, coming back to drop in groups, we might take a few detours on the way, but eventually, we find a way to navigate the person to a place where they can fly themselves to wherever they want to get to.
But no self-employed IBCLC is complete without a crack team behind them, people who tell them their flyer is wonky and fix it for them, or people who set up an entire website, people who are willing to be guinea-pigs, people who design logos and people who make them cups of tea and look after the kids all day.
Everyone has their talent and it's what makes the world go round, or makes us go round the world in the case of pilots, or an IBCLC who helps enable you to work out what's happening in your world and your baby's.
So don't trust me to fly a plane, to be honest, map reading and website design isn't my forte either, but definitely ask me to help navigate alongside you in your feeding journey and I will give you my all, my knowledge, empathy, skills and experience are all there at your finger tips (or nipples).
I properly love my job!
Kim x
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