Today’s Podcast

111: Lisa Chin is an analyst by day, an entrepreneur by night and a holistic mama 24/7. Her passions are business, health and motherhood. Being a mom has opened her heart and soul in countless ways. She started her breastfeeding experience two years ago and continues to nurse her toddler today with no intentions of stopping anytime soon.

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Lisa Chin

I am tired of your just being crazy about this.  You just need time and that has been a theme throughout all of motherhood, with the tantrums, with teething, with cluster feeding, growth spurts, it was  just like, it is going to pass.

Her Story.

Lisa Chin is an analyst by day, an entrepreneur by night and a holistic mama 24/7. Her passions are business, health and motherhood. Being a mom has opened her heart and soul in countless ways. She started her breastfeeding experience two years ago and continues to nurse her toddler today with no intentions of stopping anytime soon.

img_9978-copy-2Lisa Chin is a holistic mama to a happy two year old girl. Motherhood has profoundly changed who she is, how she sees the world and the mark she wants to leave. She seeks to live an inspired life of mothering, writing, and pursuing what calls to be created. When she’s not wrangling spreadsheets or her toddler, she can be found writing for her blog, Lisa for Real (www.lisaforreal), where she share her thoughts on fierce femininity, eureka life and motherhood moments and lessons in self-awareness. Her latest project is the Fourth Trimester Summit where Lisa has interviewed over 40 experts in women’s health, infant development and mental health who share their knowledge so new moms can create their ideal postpartum experience.

Background History: Lisa tells us that she is a second generation American as her parents came here from China from china brother was  born there and I was born her. Her brother was hard of hearing and my parents did not speak English so Lisa was the translator. of the family which made me grow up quickly. She took accounting in High School and ended up going to Business School. Her role as a mother,  has been a life changing experience.

Lisa always knew she wanted to be a mom. Her mother worked and she stayed home with her grandparents. Her parents were not really involved in her school activities and yet they were always interested and she still always felt supported. She often has said that she if she was half the mom her mother was, she would be doing great as a mother.

We talked about how we don’t really talk to each other about what motherhood is really, so that we enter motherhood without any real ideas of what it is really like. We are outside observers and yet not really talk about what a profound and yet individual experience it is for all of us.

Lisa brings us some great examples. One of them is the tendency to look at the world differently, not just on a global level but on a local level. We look at people we see every day and think “this person started off as a baby.”

Was she breastfed: She had never had this discussion with her mother before she became pregnant. When she asked her mom, her mother said: ” I could not produce anything so she had to have formula.” Lisa was immediately devastated as she was under the impression that she had been breastfed. She, of course, understands her mother’s circumstances as she worked in a factory and had to return to work in 2 weeks. And yet still, one of the first things she thought about was how she missed out on the nutritional benefits.

Early breastfeeding with her daughter: Lisa practiced confinement which is a tradition in the Chinese culture, which meant she stayed close to home for the first month. Her mom stayed with her and while, of course, she appreciated all her mother did for her, however, Lisa kind of felt it was hard as because her mother did not breastfeed, she tended to not want to listen to her help. Her mom was like so many other grandmothers in that they frequently thought her baby was still hungry after a breastfeeding.

Her mom has a sister who was a wet nurse and so while her mother did not breastfeed herself, she did believe in breastfeeding and supported Lisa’s interest in breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding education during pregnancy: She had some instruction on breastfeeding during her Bradley Childbirth Education Class, which she found very helpful. She did buy books on breastfeeding after she gave birth. In hindsight, she does wish that she did more reading before having her daughter and would have learned more about challenges that mothers can have. Her daughter had a breast preference and she struggled with latch early on. When she was shown how to latch her baby on during her hospital stay, it was her impression that the lactation consultants were pretty aggressive as far as how quickly and forceful they pushed the baby onto the breast. She had help with lactation consultants who came to visit her at home. She still did not feel this was helpful. Her husband stated at one point that she just needs time. Lisa feels this was excellent advice and she did just need time to work through some of the kinks of early breastfeeding. By the third week mark, she was past engorgement and latches became easier.

She was grateful for the family support her husband and mother provided. Lisa recognizes that she did not have to worry about anything else other than taking care of her baby and working on breastfeeding. We talk about how important family support is and how unfortunate it is that not every mom is able to have this support in her home in the early days.

We talk about how little time is actually spent on breastfeeding education and expectations. This is something we spend a lot of time on postpartum and yet we tend to think it is just going to happen and are not really prepared for what is to come. We do a great disservice for moms by not talking about the aspects of postpartum unless we are talking about depression. There is a need for women to process about the postpartum period and there is not much opportunity to do so. Lisa feels like there is not time to process the big life changes, it is like we just keep moving, don’t really stop to find out what it is like to be where you are.

Lori talks about mom-mentum.org, a mother’s group that really helped her get through the postpartum period. This group really helped her and other moms to process the immense life changes that were happening to them mentally once they became a mother. Lisa talks about her experience going through her first mom’s group. She tells us how her daughter cried when she was there and how this felt. Her daughter was about 4 weeks old and it helped her to realize how far she actually had come.

Sleep during the early days: Lisa tells us that she did not really suffer with this as she is a night owl and use to being up for many hours. Her baby did sleep well, until the 4-month sleep regression. She was back at work and her baby was not thrilled with taking a bottle. It was so rough on her that she found herself co-sleeping as a matter of survival. Lisa very use to bed sharing as she did so with her mom until she was about 12 years old. She continues to co-sleep with her daughter and she absolutely loves this part of their life. She loves waking up with her and seeing her morning smiles.

We have a great conversation on nighttime parenting and how babies do not shut down at night, Parenting does not stop at nighttime. We also talked about James McKenna and his website on co-sleeping and all the research he has done. He talks about nighttime parenting and nighttime breastfeeding and co-sleeping as being the biological norm. Lisa said that she had heard somewhere that We tell our kids to sleep in separate beds, but we spend all our lives trying to find someone to share our bed. This is so true.

We talk about what is normal. Normal sleep, normal awake time, normal feeding time and what is the normal time for babies to breastfeed and toddler nursing. Lisa makes a very good point in stating that anyone who is nursing an infant right now, should not be thinking so much about nursing a toddler as so much comes in between those 2 stages. Lisa tells us that she nurses her baby not the same as she did when she was an infant. On some days she nurses more frequently and others days the nursing is minimal. Lisa likes that nursing can help her daughter calm herself during times when she gets upset and perhaps helps reduce tantrums. Lisa is into the stage of what I call breastfeeding discipline in that she does tell her at times that she cannot nurse. Overall, this has been a fantastic experience and her plan is to wait for her daughter to wean herself, whenever that will be.

fts-facebook-2The Fourth Trimester Summit: This is an online conference. Just as you would go to a conference at a hotel or convention center, this one is online. November 9th – 18th, 2016. Each day 4-5 video interviews are shared with you and they are free to watch for the 10 days and you can decide which ones you want to tune into. I have organized it in 3 pillars which are:

1. Heal Your Body and Mind
2. Connect and nurture Baby
3. Grow and Evolve Relationships

Lisa has 40 great speakers. I am one of them, along with Rebecca Egbert, founder of The Mother Love, Adriana Lozada, doula and podcaster at Birthful, Dr. James McKenna, expert on mother-infant co sleeping and many more. Links to Summit are below.

Words of wisdom: Every mother is doing the best she can with the information she has available to her. We want to approach parenting as well as friends of parents with a level of compassion and respect that doesn’t happen all the time because we don’t realize that people are struggling. We don’t realize they are not getting the support they need. All we see are happy faces on Instagram. We need to lead by example and build a stronger society for our children.

Summit Link : http://www.fourthtrimestersummit.com/aabreastfeeding

Contact Info:

chin.lisa@gmail.com
Blog: www.lisaforreal.com
Summit: www.fourthtrimestersummit.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthysupermomsvillage/

Lori J. Isenstadt, IBCLC
Lori j Isenstadt, IBCLCLori Jill Isenstadt, IBCLC is a huge breastfeeding supporter.  She has spent much  of her adult life working in the maternal health field. Once she became turned on to birth and became a childbirth educator, there was no stopping her love of working with families during their childbearing years.  Lori became a Birth doula and a Postpartum doula and soon became a lactation consultant.  She has been helping moms and babies with breastfeeding for over 25 years.  Lori founded her private practice, All About Breastfeeding where she meets with moms one on one to help solve their breastfeeding challenges.  She is an international speaker, book author and the host of the  popular itunes podcast, All About Breastfeeding, the place where the girls hang out.  You can reach Lori by email at: aabreastfeeding@hotmail.com or contact her via her website:  allaboutbreastfeeding.biz/contact

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