Any breastfeeding mother will tell you that in those early days, you spend a lot of time on the phone. I mean, there’s bonding with your baby of course, but there’s only so much gazing at a newborn a person can do before they start getting a little bored. Not to mention the whole staying awake during hourly night feeds situation.
But up until now, the only way to describe what you’re doing to your friends has been via the bottle and babe emoji. That’s fine, except that feeding our babies for a lot of mothers involves no bottle what so ever.
Breastfeeding is one of the most natural things in the world, yet in an age where almost everything you can think of has a related emoji, it’s amazing to think that none exist for a mother breastfeeding her child.
Until now.
Rachel Lee is a Melbourne born neonatal nurse. She is currently working at the University College of London looking after premature and sick babies. Rachel says that a great deal of importance is placed on breastfeeding and it’s promoted heavily within her hospital for the health of the babies. She noticed that there was no emoji available to represent such a normal, natural situation. So, she decided to make one.
“I haven’t had any experience with this sort of thing in the past, but I do use emojis a lot!” she told Mamamia.
Rachel said that after noticing the lack of emoji, she took it upon herself to write and submit a formal proposal to Unicode (the crew responsible for our emojis) for a breastfeeding emoji.
“I feel like this is a good opportunity to advocate for mothers and babies who would benefit from breastfeeding. Being a nurse also means that I am constantly promoting health, and this is just another way to help normalise breastfeeding in society,” she said.
“The design of the emoji is something I sketched, and a designer (Joshua Jones) did the mock-ups that I included in the proposal.”
After submitting her proposal, Rachel says that Unicode responded and asked her to supply statistics showing that a breastfeeding emoji would be more popular than the emoji’s already available.
Discussions are to take place at their meeting in November, where they will decide whether or not to approve the submission.