Get ready for a few days of babywearing posts! I’ve got a couple new carriers, some pictures and one adorable baby-sized baby backpack from my own childhood.

First up, some illustrations…

From "That New Baby!" by Patricia Relf published 1980 and probably given to me when my mom was pregnant with my younger sister. I love that it's a dad wearing the baby!

From "Open House for Butterflies" by Ruth Krauss illustrations by Maurice Sendak (the Where the Wild Things Are guy) published in 1960. I loved this book as a child, it's full of adorable nonsense - exactly the sort of things a 5 year old would think or say.

For some reason when I think of babywearing, I think of it as either an ancient-times-slash-third-world-country tradition (Gasp! No strollers!) or as a novel new idea I practically thought of by myself (I’m a genius!). Clearly based on these illustrations people were doing it in 1960 and 1980 and probably every year before, between and after.

(Mostly off topic but sort of interesting sidenote: I found these pictures in a big stack of children’s books my mother had in the attic. Out of the 200+ books I looked through not a single one had a nursing mother or a breastfeeding baby anywhere in their pictures or mentioned in the story. If feeding was pictured/mentioned at all it was a bottle. Most of the books were from the 80’s – when breastfeeding lost some of the upswing it experienced in the previous decade – or from the 1950’s – when it probably wasn’t discussed at all. A quick Amazon search reveals I’m not the only one who has looked for illustrations of nursing babies and not found very many.)

Tags: babies, babywearing, books, breastfeeding, childhood, nursing, pictures, vintage