Weaning

It’s been a while since I last wrote. We celebrated a lovely, low key Christmas and New Year, as well as Mickey’s 2nd birthday at the beginning of January. The bump has grown reassuring large and we are now only a month or so from having a new member of the family. But the biggest change in mine and Mickey’s life over these last few months is that he has now weaned.

At the beginning of the pregnancy Mickey was 18 months and feeding round the clock; he needed the breast to go to sleep at night and in the day, several times at night, upon waking, plus at several other times during the day. Until I started to feel pregnant that was fine with me, I’m a firm believer in the benefits of ‘extended’ nursing. Yet as the hormones started to kick in I knew I had to make some changes.

The first thing I did was to read about it. I ordered a couple of La Leche League books from Amazon: How Weaning Happens by Diane Bengson and Adventures in Tandem Nursing by Hilary Flower. Both of these books really helped me look at my situation objectively and make some decisions.

I have to admit that the tandem nursing book actually put me off the whole idea of breastfeeding both children. I read with fear about ‘toddler revulsion’, a common condition where feeding the older child brings up all sorts of negative feelings.

It was also a surprise to me that tandem nursing is almost exclusively a Western, attachment parenting, practice. In more traditional cultures the subsequent pregnancy is usually the trigger for weaning the older child. While it seems that, contrary to popular belief, there are no nutritional or developmental problems related to breastfeeding through pregnancy and beyond, it didn’t strike me as either natural or desirable.

How Weaning Happens gave me loads of practical help on how to start the process. I decided to start with cutting down feeds rather than focus on stopping completely. Nursing was obviously still incredibly important to Mickey, both nutritionally and emotionally and I wanted to respect his needs.

At the beginning it felt that it was an impossible task. The big change was when he was able to fall asleep without feeding. That happened on a trip to London in October without me forcing the issue. I think that he had understood my discussions about it with my mother and friends and made the change himself. Until that point I couldn’t imagine that he would ever be able get to sleep without nursing! It gave me the confidence to continue gradual weaning.

Mickey is a night owl and we all go to sleep together at around 11pm. Now we read a few of his books and then it’s lights out, a couple of songs and then we all try to get to sleep. It takes Mickey between 5 and 30 minutes of rolling around and cuddling up to either me or Darren before he gets off. Quite quickly after stopping to feed to sleep he also stopped needing to be fed back to sleep if he woke during the night.

Getting to sleep for his after lunch day nap proved more difficult to cut out as it isn’t possible for us to make the house completely dark and all go to bed at that time. We have resorted to driving him to sleep every day, not ideal but necessary as he still needs a good 3 hour sleep to make it through to bed time.

The last key feed was waking up in the morning. I finally decided to stop it about a week after his birthday. Some mornings it was easier to avoid, just by getting up earlier than him and letting Darren tend to him when he woke. We did have a couple of heart wrenching cries when I refused him that first week. One day I let him have it and the expression on his face of pure bliss made me feel really guilty. But I had to remind myself of the negative feelings I was already experiencing while feeding him and my conviction that this was not healthy for either of us.

Some days he forgot to ask and then I realized a week had gone by without a feed. The day before yesterday he was really upset when Darren had to go out without him and he cried nonstop for over half an hour. In the end I resorted to offering him the breast for comfort and he immediately stopped crying and started to suckle. However, it seemed he had already forgotten how to do it. It seems extraordinary that he could lose the reflex in the space of only a few weeks.

I’m reserving judgment on whether he has completely weaned until the baby is born and the new milk comes in. If I feel he really needs to feed at that point then I am open to that. I never like to say never and I believe people who say that tandem nursing can help with sibling rivalry.

Right now I am enjoying having a few months off feeding duty although a part of me is sad that I wasn’t able to carry on giving Mickey the comfort he loved so much.