Announcing...The Story of Jessie's Milkies

The Story of Jessie’s Milkies is available from Amazon here: The Story of Jessie's Milkies

Or, if you prefer not to use Amazon, ask your local book shop to order from our other publisher, Ingram Spark, and libraries can order from them too. 

This podcast is presented by Emma Pickett IBCLC, and produced by Emily Crosby Media.

Transcript

This transcript is AI generated.

Emma Pickett: Little drum roll. Okay. I'm really bad at drum roll sound effects. Um, I'm really excited to share with you my brand new book, the Story of Jessie's Milky. So if you've known me for a little bit while you'll know that I've been talking about supporting the ending of breastfeeding for a few years now.

About half my clients at the moment are people who are ending their breastfeeding journeys, and I know how vital it is that people get help to bring their breastfeeding to the close that they feel happy about. And I own pretty much every picture book that exists in this space, and many of them are brilliant and I will continue promoting them in my work.

But I did feel there was some gaps and I wanted to fill those gaps. So I wanted a book that talked about self weaning or child-led weaning. I wanted a book. That talked about tandem feeding, so breastfeeding a baby alongside an older child. I wanted a book that had a parent led weaning journey, but just had a little bit more about why parents might want to end breastfeeding and about mommy's body being tired and needing a rest, and that it was okay for there to be some sadness around that.

I couldn't write three books. So I thought back to the books that I loved when I was a kid. Those choose your own adventure books, where the characters would pick a different path to go down. And the story of Jessie's Milky was born. So this is a book that talks about how breastfeeding ends in different ways for different people.

And you can pick which of Jessie's endings you want to explore. So you might read it once and only focus on one ending. You might come back to it and read a different ending every time. So in one story, there's a baby on its way, and we talk about how mama's body sometimes can't do a long milk keys because it's a bit sore and sometimes Jesse can only have short milk keys, but when baby comes, he will go on to share milk with a baby and, and we show that happening.

Then in the second story, and by the way, the different stories are represented with different colors and different animals, so hopefully they're easy to distinguish. Then the second story, mama talks about how grownup bodies aren't good at waking up through the night, and she's really sorry, but Milky needs to be sleeping at nighttime, and we have space for the emotions around that, and we show how Jesse is supported through that.

And then in the last ending of Jessie's story, I show a child led weaning journey. So a self weaning journey where Jessie's interest in breastfeeding gradually fades over time. And I'm really excited about the illustrations provided by the wonderful Jojo Ford who's done some work in the breastfeeding space for lots of different people than was my illustrator for my last couple of books as well.

There are a couple of illustrations in there, which honestly bring a tear to my eye every time I look at them, which is slightly inconvenient because I've had to look at many different proofs of this book. They are really, really special, and I'm really proud to share them with you. I've shared this book with several moms that I've been working with and families I've been working with, and the feedback has been universally positive and lovely, and I really do feel confident that this book will support families in their conversations about how breastfeeding continues and how breastfeeding ends conversations around parent led weaning and not parent led weaning.

So welcome to the story of Jessie's Milky. I very much hope you like it. Jojo and I spent a bit of time thinking about the best way of selling this book. We're not up for filling our houses with creative books that we go to the post office and post, so I'm afraid we are using print on demand with Amazon.

But if you're looking for wholesale, we've also set the book up with Ingram Spark. If you don't want to buy from Amazon, you can go to an individual bookshop and ask them to order it from Ingram Spark, and libraries can also order it from Ingram Spark as well. You will find a link in my bio on Instagram that tells you how to buy the book, and there'll be a link in the show notes to this episode as well.

And yeah, I'm just really excited to share with you the Story of Jessie's Milkies and I really hope you like it. And um, yep. Thank you for listening if you've got this far. Thanks.