In Our Babies, Ourselves, which I'm sure you all read after reading my last blog, we learned that pretty much the only thing different cultures have in common is that they're all absolutely certain that they're raising babies the one right way, and everyone else is wrong and should be corrected before they do irreparable harm to their poor babies.

I, like the rest of humanity, am now an expert in how other people should be raising their kids. As credentials, I have checked many books on childrearing out of the library and read most of them. As if that weren't qualification enough, I can now report that Thelma's first pediatrician's appointment yesterday was great. Not only is she perfectly healthy, but in her first 14 days of life, she gained 13 ounces. The standard expectation for American hospital-born babies is to actually lose weight for the first week or so, and then, by the end of the second week, to return to their birth weight. I didn't go to all the trouble of giving birth to this big baby just to have her shrink afterwards. She's been gaining steadily since she was born. I'm getting an increasing workout every day just picking her up.

Now that my credentials are established, I will pontificate on what other people are doing wrong, at, of all places, today's La Leche League meeting. My mother was excited to go there with me, since she's a retired La Leche League leader herself. I didn't need any particular advice or support, but I figured I'd go there to show off Thelma.

This month's meeting had a different leader than last time, and the topic seemed to be Problems. One woman had a problem with low milk supply, she said. Her month-old baby weighs a couple pounds less than she did at birth. The mother is pumping her milk with a machine to try to increase her supply. She's feeding her baby every two hours in the daytime, and sometimes at night, but she says she has trouble waking up when the alarm goes off in the middle of the night for feedings.

This problem started a discussion of which makes and models of pumps are best, and how some women are unfortunate enough to require the more expensive models to pump effectively. Meanwhile, my mother and I were thinking the same things: What's this about feeding her baby every two hours? Thelma often eats more frequently than that, not that I'm timing her. The baby is hungry when the baby is hungry, not when the clock says it's feeding time. Also, this business about not being roused by an alarm clock in the middle of the night makes perfect sense, when you consider that she didn't give birth to an alarm clock, and has no evolution-honed instinct to respond to its signals. She gave birth to a baby, and if she keeps the baby close enough to her at nighttime, she will be able to pick up on its hunger signals and respond to them. That means she will produce milk automatically in response to her hungry baby, just as all mammals do. Hoping that she can be made to produce milk in response to some more expensive pump is completely missing the point. If you wanted to produce, say, saliva, which would be a better way to do it, being served a mouth-watering meal, or hooking some saliva-sucking machine up to your mouth?

But these gearheads kept discussing milk-sucking machines. My mother told me I should interrupt this discussion to offer different advice, but I said she should do it, since she was the retired leader and all. Telling other people how to raise their kids is much easier in a blog than in person. Then it was time to leave the meeting early, since I had to get to a dentist appointment. But my mother, who has no blog, offered the mother of the skinny baby some simple advice on the way out. "Try nursing more often," she said. That was probably better than the long evolution-laced rant I would have come up with.

I hope the skinny baby gets enough to eat soon.