Robin’s just about a year and half old now, and we’re kicking it up a notch on the weaning. We were already down to three nursing sessions a day—morning, noon and night. That happened fairly organically. There wasn’t much conscious scheduling on my part other than a vague notion that I didn’t want to be nursing every hour and a half anymore. I guess I just started pushing it a little, not offering the breast first thing when he got fussy (but continuing to nurse him when he really demanded it) and that’s what the schedule settled into.<\/p>\n
The real breakthrough was giving up our midnight nursing sessions. Boy, am I happy about that. The baby book advised me to refuse middle-of-the-night feedings long, long ago, but Robin had different ideas. And when it’s two A.M. and you just want to go back to sleep and the baby is screaming his head off and you know<\/strong> that simply nursing him will send him right back into slumberland…well, anything the books may say suddenly becomes a lot less compelling. So Robin got his way on that for a long time.<\/p>\n But it’s been a couple of months now without any midnight feedings. Again, all I did was keep pushing just a little: offering pats and soothing words instead of putting him to the breast right away. For a long time Robin pushed right back, insisting<\/em> on a feeding, and then something changed; suddenly he was willing to be soothed. He would go back to sleep without the nursing. It was totally a change in him, not a change in anything I did. And boy, does it make my life easier.<\/p>\n So yeah, that was the biggest step as far as I was concerned. But lately I’ve been feeling that we should continue the weaning process. So as of today we’re dropping the morning session. I gave him a cup of milk instead, which he drank, and that seemed to go over okay although he definitely noticed the change in routine. He has a signal he gives when he wants to nurse: we have a nursing pillow on the couch, and he’ll walk up to it and start patting it. He’s been doing that off and on throughout the morning, like, “hey Mommy, I think you forgot something.” But I when I give him his milk cup instead, he accepts it.<\/p>\n The other two nursing sessions are going to be harder to give up. The noon feeding puts him down for his nap, and the evening feeding puts him to sleep for the night. “Milk coma,” we call it, and it’s by far the easiest way to get him to drop off. If for whatever reason he doesn’t nod off while nursing, we know we’re in for a long evening of increasingly-crabby baby, until finally either Sam gets him to sleep by walking and bouncing him, or I lie in bed with him singing lullabies while he squirms all around and kicks me in the face. So yeah, I’m not particularly eager to give up one of the most potent tools in my mothering utility belt. We’ll keep going with two nursing sessions a day for a while longer yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Robin’s just about a year and half old now, and we’re kicking it up a notch on the weaning. We were already down to three nursing sessions a day—morning, noon and night. That happened fairly organically. There wasn’t much conscious scheduling on my part other than a vague notion that I didn’t want to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":349,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions\/349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}