Wrap Dresses I Wore Through Pregnancy and Kept Wearing to Breastfeed

I was sick of buying a maternity dress, wearing it eight times, then shoving it in the back of my closet. These wrap dresses adjusted with my belly and then made breastfeeding in public actually possible without a cover-up circus act.

The first time I tried to nurse in a restaurant wearing a regular shirt, I basically flashed the entire table next to us. These tops have hidden panels or wrap fronts that let you feed without performing a wardrobe magic trick.

My regular bras stopped fitting around month four, and the first nursing bra I bought dug into my ribs so badly I wanted to cry. These actually feel good on a body that's constantly changing size.

Pants were my nemesis. Too tight one week, falling down the next. I needed bottoms that could handle a growing belly and then a shrinking-but-still-soft postpartum body without me buying four different sizes.

Sometimes you want to wear a normal outfit and just throw something over it that makes nursing possible. Cardigans and kimonos became my secret weapons for feeding in places where I felt self-conscious.

Nobody warned me about all the little things that go wrong when you're breastfeeding out in the world. Leaking through shirts, forgetting burp cloths, having nothing to wipe spit-up with. These small items saved me from a lot of embarrassing moments.

After delivery, I lived in about four items on rotation. Nothing with buttons, nothing that required bending over to pull on, nothing that touched my c-section incision. These were the pieces that got me through the blur of the fourth trimester.