In the midst of weaning, I complained to a friend about how stressful it was to wean a baby who was "addicted to nursing" and had started being able to express his desire to nurse. I said, "I wish he would just wean himself -- rejection would be so much easier than this guilt I'm feeling!" She responded by saying that once the weaning period ended, or in her case
almost ended, he would reject me and it would hurt my feelings.
I thought,
"C'est impossible!" Not my baby. Not my baby who loves nursing!
Yes. It's possible. To test her theory, last night, I tried to see if he would remember and nurse again. He smiled, pretended he was going to nurse, and then pushed me away.
Undeterred, I tried again.
He pushed me away again. He *may* have screamed in anger that time.
WAH!!!!
That was me crying, by the way. He happily drank his milk when I let him have his sippy back.
C'est la vie. He doesn't need me for milk anymore. Well, actually, he does need us to buy the milk. Which he drinks by the bucketfuls. Do you know how much bucketfuls of organic milk costs, people? Do you? Do you?
But, I digress. The point of this already long blog post was to answer
Samantha's questions on my last post about my weaning experience. So...without further ado, here goes (Samantha's comments/questions are bold):
I am so happy to hear that it went relatively easily. Well...I think relatively easy is not the term I would use. To be frank, I've been trying to wean since early October. Since I work out of the home, I had slowly dropped my pumping sessions from four (!!!!) to none over 3 weeks. The problem was, though, that Grant was nursing MORE when I got home from work, through the night, and on the weekends. There were weekend days where he'd want to nurse every 2 hours. I felt like we were back in the newborn stage! It took me a while to figure out, though, that while it may have been because my supply was dipping, it really was more because he needed the comfort and bonding time. I think he was learning to walk during this period, so I think his mind and body were just going into overdrive.
The next stage of weaning started around the third week of November, by dropping the night feedings. This was HARD. As you all may remember, we co-sleep. Which makes dropping night feedings THAT MUCH HARDER. But, I realized he really wasn't drinking at night, it was more for comfort than hunger. So...I was ok with not offering any milk during that time. Basically, the first night, he woke up oh...approximately every hour, wanting to nurse. Tom, bless his heart, really wanted to help comfort him, but my beloved sleeps through anything. And I mean anything. Including a screaming baby, sitting up, crawling between my beloved and me. So, I held a pillow to my chest (in a futile attempt to block the smell of milk, but in a successful attempt to block G from getting to the milk), and I shushed and comforted him through what seemed like a billion minutes of blood-curdling screams. And he would eventually tire out and go to sleep. After 3 nights, where the wakeups decreased to one, we successfully completed this stage! He still wakes up once a night, but now, I'll pull him over and we'll snuggle and, usually, he'll put his hand on my face and fall back asleep. *heart melter!*
Next, I dropped the mid-day feed and offered him whole milk in a sippy. Cold milk. I thought about trying to offer him warm milk, but I really did not want to get him used that -- and daycare only offers cold milk. He really really hated this stage. Like, throwing the sippy on the floor, angry crying, flinging his body everywhere. At first, I kept trying to offer it to him
while he was mad, but that just made him angrier. Then, I realized he was just way too upset to even think about drinking from his sippy. So I poured it in a bottle and, after he calmed down, I offered it to him. And he took it! I did need to get him used a sippy for daycare, so we eventually transitioned to sippy. Three days into it, I dropped the evening feed. This was surprisingly super easy. He would drink his sippy for about 20 minutes, while playing with me and Appah, and then he'd roll over and go to sleep. Three days later, I dropped the morning feed, which was the hardest because it is the one I think G loved the most. But I snuggled him and offered him a sippy, and
voila! We were done!
Did you have any problems with engorgement or anything? Hmm...I think because my body had regulated itself and was a super efficient milk-producer, the engorgement wasn't as bad as if I had stopped when my body was ramping up its supply. However, the first couple of days, I had to hand express some because I was in pain. I definitely leaked a lot, so have a lot of breast pads on hand! I've heard peppermint tea or Altoids (because they have peppermint extract in them) help, so I was popping those. I'm not sure if they actually helped, but I had really fresh breath! ;) I was still in mild pain and the girls were really tender for about a week (which only really hurt when G occassionally flung himself onto me while we were laying in bed).
Had he slowed down prior to this? As I mentioned before, nope. He was still nursing on weekends all.the.time. However, what I noticed was that as soon as we were getting ready to do the hardcore weaning, he started eating a lot more solids. He had always eaten solids but never so heartily! And as soon as weaning ended, it seemed like he was an eating machine! He also never took more than 4 ounces of breastmilk out of a bottle, but now he can drink at least 6 or more ounces at a time. I'm not sure if this is just a coincidence because he turned one around the time I decided to wean, but it convinced me that we made the right decision to nurse until at least one year.
Well, that does it for Samantha's questions. I'm so glad she asked me because I think it'll be helpful for me to look back on it if I ever am so lucky to breastfeed another baby. The main piece of advice would be to only do it when you are emotionally ready, because it requires quite a bit of resolve to get through the tears and guilt. People said that I would feel free once I weaned, but honestly, I don't really feel free. I still feel sad about it. I would've nursed for a while longer, but I know we are doing this to be able to say we gave G the best shot we could at a sibling. I will say that I'm excited for the FET (but AF doesn't want to show - darn her!) and although I feared that my baby and I wouldn't snuggle, I was totally wrong. He seems to give me random hugs even more now, and they seem even bigger and warmer than before. And I.love.them. :)
