That explains a lot.

I haven't talked much about breastfeeding, but this has to be shared.

I breastfed Macy exclusively for about five months, then weaned her slowly until she was eight months. She has never been a good eater (still) and breastfeeding was absolutely no exception. I had to pump a lot because it was so much easier to feed her from a bottle.

Josh could not be more different. He has exclusively breastfed since day one and has only had one or two bottles. I'm starting to think about weaning because he's reaching that magical age of one year and I've had enough. I went online to look at how often I should be feeding him now to get an idea of how much milk he should be drinking when we're done. I stumbled across this awesome article about how breastfeeding moms are more aggressive than bottle-feeders or non-mothers. Here's the abstract and a link to the pretty hilarious article on babycenter.com (the comments are the best part). The study was done at UCLA on Utah mothers.

Maternal Defense
Breast Feeding Increases Aggression by Reducing Stress
Mothers in numerous species exhibit heightened aggression in defense of their young. This shift typically coincides with the duration of lactation in nonhuman mammals, which suggests that human mothers may display similarly accentuated aggressiveness while breast feeding. Here we report the first behavioral evidence for heightened aggression in lactating humans. Breast-feeding mothers inflicted louder and longer punitive sound bursts on unduly aggressive confederates than did formula-feeding mothers or women who had never been pregnant. Maternal aggression in other mammals is thought to be facilitated by the buffering effect of lactation on stress responses. Consistent with the animal literature, our results showed that while lactating women were aggressing, they exhibited lower systolic blood pressure than did formula-feeding or never-pregnant women while they were aggressing. Mediation analyses indicated that reduced arousal during lactation may disinhibit female aggression. Together, our results highlight the contributions of breast feeding to both protecting infants and buffering maternal stress.

http://blogs.babycenter.com/mom_stories/9-2-2011-lactating-moms-react-with-more-aggression/


 I have to say, I do feel more aggressive. I fight for things more (like at restaurants and stores) instead of just letting them go like I normally would. I thought all this was just because I was growing up and getting braver and stuff, but now I'm starting to wonder . . .