Nursing Bras and Nursing Tops

Looking for The Lactivist? She's retired. But you CAN still find Jen blogging. These days, she's runs A Flexible Life. Join her for life, recipes, projects and the occasional rant.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Went shopping yesterday to pick up some new nursing bras and discovered (and bought) some pretty cool nursing tops as well. Whole new experience for me, since I certainly didn't need such things for pumping.

I had two nursing bras left over that I'd bought before my last pregnancy and since I was worried that nursing wouldn't work this time around, I hadn't bought any more. A week into things, I'm confident enough that I'll be nursing for the next year or so that I figured it was time to go spend some cash.

Since the Target around here seems to have stopped carrying much in the way of nursing bras (or at least in the way of nursing bras for those of us that have *ahem* "large capacity storage tanks") I headed to the mall to check out Motherhood. Turns out that this was a pretty good call as Motherhood has quite the impressive collection of nursing bras ALL of which are VERY reasonably priced. (Ranging from $11-$20 as compared to the $40-$50 that I see online.)

Turns out they only had one underwire nursing bra in my size in the whole store, but thankfully it was a great fit (and just $16) so I bought it with plans to order more from their web site. Then I noticed the nursing tops.

I was intrigued.

Originally, I hadn't really seen the sense in nursing tops. After all, you just pull up the corner of your shirt and go to town, right?

Not really. I tend to wear fairly fitted clothing. The problem with that is that when you pull up the corner of an article of fitted clothing, the rest of it comes up too. That means that if I were to nurse in public wearing one of my "normal" shirts, I would really be flashing breast, but I would be flashing a LOT of stomach. Now, I'm not 16 anymore and I'm also just a week out from birthing a 9.5 pound baby. (In other words, I'm not real keen on having my gut hanging out there for the world to see.)

So, I checked out the nursing tops and found a few styles that I really liked. Since I work at home, I figure I could likely snag half a dozen or so over time and simply wear them on days that I know I'll be out and about and having to NIP several times. Unfortunately, the selections in the store are fairly limited, so I was only able to find two that I liked and that fit, but here they are if you want to check them out.

White v-neck t-shirt
Green double layered boy shirt

And I plan on ordering this polo shirt and this baseball tee. (Or maybe putting them on my Christmas list...)

Anyway, I love the idea behind these...cute shirts, but they have a nice second layer of shirt underneath that gives you stomach (and back) coverage while allowing you easy access to nurse. That said, with the style being to layer shirts right now, I can't help but think that you could EASILY just buy a few plain t-shirts, cut out holes for your breasts and wear them underneath another layered shirt, thus creating your own nursing tops, but without spending the cash that people seem to think it's ok to charge for "real" nursing tops.

Now I just know that some of you are wondering "so she went to the mall with the baby...did the baby have to eat? What happened? Did she NIP during her first week of breastfeeding?" The answer is yes, I'll tell ya later and yes.

Look for a post over the weekend about the Lactivist earning her stripes when it comes to NIP. ;)

Labels: Product Reviews

Want to chime in with your own thoughts? Click here to comment.