Saturday with Mez

by Lauren Serafin, Jason Rohrer, and Mez

Children seem to think that whatever they are exposed to on a regular basis is normal. Therefore, I wanted my child to see other nursing children as much as possible so that he would know it is normal. We all know that the breastfeeding rates in the USA and Canada are appallingly low. Pediatricians across the board will agree that breastfeeding is the best. Why, then, are we only seeing images of bottle feeding in children’s books?

Somewhere around the time when Mez was 12 months old, he was very interested in looking at photographs of people. Since he also liked to tear pictures up, we had to find board books with photographs in them. The majority of children’s board books contained drawings instead of photographs, which Mez didn’t like. My husband, Jason, and I found ourselves picking through the many board books at our local library in order to find some that had photographs.

What we found surprised us. We never once saw an image of a child nursing. We found plenty of photographs featuring bottles, pacifiers, and babies eating junk food such as ice cream, chocolate, and orange cheese curls. I found myself censoring what Mez could look at because I didn’t want him to think that bottle feeding was normal and that breastfeeding was not. I did web searches to try to find board books that contained photographs of children nursing. At that time, I only found one such book. When Jason and I discussed how ridiculous this was, we knew we had to create one. Little did we know it would take so long to produce a book we could feel comfortable selling.

We purchased a used digital camera that could take pictures with high enough resolution to be blown up for book images. Then we planned for a day during which we would photograph every situation we were in. On Saturday, September 4, 2004, we took our pictures. We followed a then 17-month-old Mez around on one of his typical days. To make the story as realistic as possible, we decided to use natural lighting in every situation. This is why the photos towards the end of the book are darker – they were taken as the daylight was fading toward nighttime.

Taking the photographs was the easy part. Finding a printer who could manufacture the book in the USA or Canada was a challenge. Despite knowing that almost 100% of children’s board books are manufactured overseas, I was still surprised when I couldn’t find a single company willing to produce the book in the USA or Canada.

Luckily, Jason comes from a printing family and knows a lot about printing. Instead of giving up, we started inquiring at local print shops, hoping they could print the pages of the book onto thick card stock. Our plan was to then hand-bind the pages to create a board book. We couldn’t find a printer who had the capability of printing on thick enough cardboard in our local area. Finally, we started discussing our ideas with Jason’s parents, who own and operate Rohrer Corporation in Wadsworth, Ohio. Rohrer Corporation prints the backing cards for packaging products such as batteries. We were able to convince them to print the pages of the book.

The final hurdle was finding organic cotton string to hand bind the books. I was unable to locate organic cotton string grown and manufactured in the USA or Canada. However, I was able to find organic cotton yarn that was grown and manufactured in the USA. Sally Fox, of Vreseis Ltd. (www.vreseis.com), grows and produces 100% organic color grown cotton yarn in Arizona, and it is absolutely beautiful.
The pages from each book must be collated and hand bound by either my husband or myself. This was not how we had envisioned the manufacturing process when we started this project long ago, but it was the only option we felt comfortable with. We strongly believe that people in our country should not take advantage of cheap labor in the third world in order to maximize profits.

After nearly two years of work on this project, we are excited to introduce our book Saturday With Mez: A day in the life of a breastfeeding toddler. The book features 28 pages of high-quality black and white photographs, including 6 different shots of Mez nursing. It is an independently published book that can be previewed for free, in its entirety, on our website [http://laurenserafin.com/saturdayWithMez]. Those who do not have access to the Internet can order by phone at 315-265-0585. The cost of the book is $10 (US) plus shipping.