Nursing Clothes; dressing the part.. how to find something cute to wear

um, okay, so you thought dressing for pregnancy was hard? HA! At least for pregnant gals you can roll into Target and pick up a half dozen outfits for $100.00 or even drop $175.00 on fabulous designer pregnancy jeans. Nursing? Now that's a real problem. Let me count the ways...

1) trying to access your breasts in the middle of the night with a squawking newborn after you woke up wondering why in god's name did you sign up for this?
2) trying to access your breasts 12 + times a day-- period.
3) trying to cover your fat gut while access your breasts 12+ times a day...with 10+ visitors a day.
4) having much larger than normal breasts that seem to take up too much room in your cute t-shirts that used to fit fine, which when and if you find one that still fits, you pull it up to nurse, your entire belly shows...beautiful!!
5) attempting to wear a dress because dresses are cool and comfy in summer time-- but seriously you have to pull the whole thing off to access those breasts I was talking about...

You see where I'm going with this? It's hard and let's face it, historically nursing clothes have been, in a word, matronly.

So I struggled through the first 4 months with renewed optimism that I could simply find the things in my closet AKA my *REAL* clothes that fit and wear them nursing. Sounds reasonable, right? I even drew inspiration from my lovely and very accomplished nursing friends who wear regular clothes. I never see their nipples, so why should it be a problem for me?

Despite my enthusiasm for re-discovering clothing that hadn't fit in months, I had the brilliant idea to supplement with a few nursing tank tops and voila all my outfits would be magically turned into ready-to-flop-a-boob-at-any-moment-outfits! Right? Wrong. How many ways can you wear two nursing tank tops? Let me answer that. Many, many, many, ways but eventually, you just want to wear something else... like something that doesn't include the need to wear pants (dreaded waist-ridden garments that dig into your still pooching belly).

I swear if I try on my real jeans ONE MORE time and they don't fit, I'm going to freak.

Answer to my prayers?

Two fold.
1) Get online and order some nursing wear.
2) lose the gut

I mean surely there HAS to be a company out there that services the poor slobs like myself who are trying to give their kid free nourishment while running a photography business. In my hours of pouring over the world wide web I found two decent sites. count them, ONE-TWO. Luckily both were pretty good and I like what I got.

Items I think EVERY nursing mother should own
1) 2 great nursing night gowns
2) 2-4 great nursing tank tops (seriously, they do turn those cardigans into an outfit)
3) a couple nursing dresses. They make these. *hooray* They are wonderful in the summer
4) a few interesting, cute nursing tops... for those times when you HAVE to be in public and you would prefer not to get pulled for indecent exposure.
5) last but NOT least. An arsenal of AWESOME nursing bras. You'll need one larger one to wear at night (these boobs are too heavy to go bare), and a few others. My favorite one is a strapless nursing bra by La Leche League. It allows me some freedom to wear some fun summer tank tops and dresses. Thank you, La Leche League.

Solution #1 Expresssiva and Boob, which I got at Baby Center.com
(I also like my Target nursing tank top for $14.95. I have two Glamour Mom tank tops and well, there are all sorts of internal structure issues that are annoying, but I still wear them).
Solution #2: hit the gym: HARD. Matt and I have been going to the gym first thing in the mornings and Owen enjoys the "nursery" and kids club. I was freaked out at first that he would contract some horrible flu virus, but hey, it's summer. I'm playing the odds.