Since my daughter’s birth, my wife has been involved in La Leche League, meeting with the most local group we have, which is in Calhoun, Georgia (25 miles up the road.) For the initiated, La Leche League was founded 50 years ago to support mothers in breastfeeding their children. At that time, of course, the medical community was telling us that formula is substantially better than breastmilk at nourishing babies, and we were buying it even though it makes no sense at all. The founders advocated for breastfeeding mothers’ rights to provide nutrition to their babies, and eventually developed an international organization with key principles recognizing the superiority of breastmilk for feeding babies, that mothers instinctively know what is best for their children, that fathers have a unique role to play in child-rearing, and that loving guidance (which is nearly synonymous with the concept of attachment parenting) is most effective in developing children who are well-behaved but not devoid of personality or rebellious (both of which can result from baby-training methods like Furber or Ezzo.)

Anyway, for the second year, I attended the annual conference with my wife and daughter. Last year it was at a big hotel in metro Atlanta, but this year it was at Unicoi State Park and Lodge near alpine Helen, Georgia. Unicoi’s a much better location, and it’ll be there again next year. Thursday morning, we loaded up the minivan, and I mean to the hilt, because we had 2 additional passengers, a mother and child who are in our group, whose husband/father wasn’t going to be able to arrive till Friday afternoon. I’ve never loaded the roof rack of a minivan before, but I learned.

Now, I don’t have an illusions about my role at this event. My major purpose is to keep our stuff organized and keep my daughter occupied so my wife can get the greatest benefit from the conference sessions. She’s considering being a LLL leader, so she needs to be able to give her attention to how things are conducted and what’s taught. So, after dropping off all my passengers at a picnic shelter where a barbecue was taking place, I went to our cabins and unloaded…our stuff and our additional passengers’ stuff.

Rather than one loooong post, I will pause here to collect my thoughts for the next installment.