Natural choice
Tom McCoag / Amherst Bureau
Nancy Letcher gets help from five-month-old Abbey as she writes a note on her Cumberland County Breastfeeds calendar. Letcher was one of more than a dozen women who posed with their children for the calendar.

Natural choice
Calendar designed to encourage breastfeeding as healthier, cheaper than bottles, formula

By Tom McCoag / Amherst Bureau

Amherst - BEING photographed for a calendar promoting breastfeeding came naturally for Carey Ewert and her six-month-old son Ocean.

"It wasn't strange at all posing for the photographer, Catherine Bussiere," Ewert says, glancing over at the calendar whose cover features her and Ocean. "It was something we were doing anyway, and as far as I was concerned it was just a picture of me feeding my baby."

Ewert was one of more than a dozen women photographed breastfeeding their babies for Cumberland County Breastfeeds, a 2003 calendar produced by the Cumberland Breastfeeding Network to encourage the process in the county.

"I was four months pregnant when I came to Nova Scotia from Alberta, and I was shocked because awareness here about breastfeeding is a lot less than it is in Alberta," Ewert says.

"In fact, in the month that I gave birth to Ocean, I was the only mother who told the nurses at the hospital that I was going to breastfeed my baby."