Weaning

Honestly when we started out we didn’t really know how long we wanted to breastfeed for. We were pretty sure that we would go at least six months, and we went on happily until around month ten when Lu officially became a very wild nurser (she’s always been a little wild). She would flail all over, put her feet on my shoulders (yes, while nursing), pinch me, whack me, yank whatever jewelry I was wearing. For a while I dealt with the flailing nurser, but then sometime in the middle of the night while we were in California I decided it was time to cut down. I was trying to feed our crazy, teething little girl and she was thrashing all over the place. The next morning I told Andy that I wanted to start weaning when we got home, and he said, “Well you are the one doing it, so whenever you are ready is good by me.” It has been a very smooth process so far. We’ve worked on increasing her solid food consumption and she quickly went down to two or three sessions a day. At this point she began to consider nursing during the day to be way too time consuming and boring, and would only nurse for a couple of minutes before she was off and running again. At this point she is only nursing when she wakes up at night to go back to sleep, which is usually just once.

I was so amazed that she cut back so naturally. Initially I was quite nervous about weaning since I’ve heard lots of horror stories. It makes me think I wasn’t the only one ready to cut down. Now, we both seem with the arrangement. I don’t mind nursing her when she wakes up during the night and she doesn’t have to settle down to nurse during the day when she would rather be playing with Reba, bringing me giant legos, finding little bits of food (hopefully it’s food) on the floor to chew on, breaking into the bathroom, figuring out how to navigate baby locks…you get the idea.

I’m not sure how long we’ll wait to cut her off completely. I am content letting her keep up her nightly feeding time for a while, but I’m not sure how long my supply will last.