Four-month-old Arden Wray is hungry.
For mom Carmel that means a trip to the bathroom.
That’s the only somewhat-private place she’s managed to find at Regina Exhibition Park where she can nurse her son.
“He likes to look around while he eats,” Wray explained from her uncomfortable perch on a toilet seat.
There are other places she could sit – a seat in the Agridome perhaps – but with Arden popping up to look around every so often, keeping herself covered is difficult.
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For Wray and other mothers at the Western Canada Farm Progress Show, taking care of their children’s needs can be a little difficult.
In the Farm Family Pavilion, where family shows and activities take place, the women’s washroom is down three flights of stairs. There is no chair for a nursing mother to sit on, nor a change table for changing diapers.
But even in venues where a change table is provided, some mothers prefer not to use them.
“I’d sooner change her in our vehicle than in some of the change rooms,” said Patty Cooke of Kindersley, Sask. of her 18-month-old daughter.
Jenna Harlos, five months, is getting her diaper changed in her stroller on the Agridome concourse.
“This is mine, it’s cleaner,” said Connie Harlos of Moose Jaw.
She said she looked around for a spot where there weren’t too many people before taking her daughter’s diaper off. She wouldn’t have had a problem nursing in public as long as she was covered, she said, but she wondered how comfortable other people, especially older men, would feel.
The solution, women agree, would be to have one or more places on the grounds that catered to mothers, babies and small children and make sure those places are advertised and kept clean.
“I knew where to go because I’ve been here before,” said Wray, in the bathroom at Queensbury Centre. The Russell, Man. mother has four children under the age of five.
She said placing chairs in the bathrooms would be a start to improving the situation, especially for women with babies who fuss and look around while they nurse.
Doug Cressman, exhibition park manager, said facilities called baby comfort stations are provided at events like the Buffalo Days exhibition. He wasn’t sure why they weren’t set up for the farm progress show, except that demographics likely showed the bulk of the crowd is older farmers.
“But you raise a very good point,” he said. “It’s something we should look into.”
One problems with the facilities is that many of them are located in old buildings that serve several purposes in the course of the year, Cressman said. They don’t have all the amenities to begin with, and because space is limited during major events, Cressman said staff tend to focus on transforming the buildings themselves.
For example, Canada Centre hosts everything from livestock shows to car sales and, for a national conference of municipal delegates, was recently was turned into a convention centre complete with carpeting – but no baby comfort station.
“We try to make them as flexible as we can,” he said. “You don’t always think about all the niceties that go with it.”
Wray said a proper place for babies to eat is just common sense.
“We wouldn’t want to eat in a bathroom. Why should they?”
