Thoughts on Weaning

If you continue breastfeeding after your child begins eating food, a common question you can expect to be asked is "How long are you planning to keep doing that?"  My usual answer was, "Until one of us is ready to stop."  While many lactation advocates indicate that you should keep nursing until your baby self-weans, I feel like the lactating mother's feelings matter, too.  If I could have seen the future, the concrete answer to that question would have been "Until she is 19 months old."  That's right-- Nora is no longer a breastfeeding toddler, and while I am very happy and proud to have provided her with all the advantages of breastmilk, I am also glad to be done nursing her.

In case anyone is curious, I thought I'd explain what the process of weaning was like for us.  I was determined to get to one year of exclusive breastfeeding so we could bypass formula entirely.  As I've mentioned before, this required a LOT of effort on my part once she began full time day care.  I spent the month before building up a freezer stash by pumping every night before bed.  Once she began day care, I was pumping twice during the day for about 15-20 minutes, and then I would pump again for about the same amount of time before I went to bed.  She still nursed like normal on the weekends.

This kept us going until her first birthday, at which point we decided to start mixing in alternate milk.  Since Nora has the dreaded dairy allergy, we first started with almond milk, which is more easily available.  After a few weeks of what seemed like continuous cold symptoms, we switched to coconut milk, and have stuck with that ever since.  Since these milks don't have as much fat as whole milk, we have made sure to supplement those fats in her diet with things like avocado, Earth Balance spread, coconut oil, etc.

We wanted to introduce non-human milk gradually, and I wanted to reduce my supply slowly because I have always had difficulty with hormonal changes.  So I first dropped the nighttime pumping session, and this resulted in mixing about 3oz of breastmilk with 1oz of almond/coconut milk for each bottle.  If Nora noticed any difference, it didn't bother her.  A few weeks later, and a few weeks before my comprehensive exam, I cut back to pumping once mid-day.  At that point the bottles were more like 50/50.  By the time I passed my exam, I was so tired of pumping that one of the ways I celebrated was by giving up pumping entirely.  I did suffer some headaches with each dropped pumping session, and when I stopped pumping altogether, they were noticeably worse, but that only lasted about a week.

From late November through early February, Nora was nursing when she woke up and when she went to bed, and she was drinking coconut milk during the day.  While I was home with her in December and January, we worked on switching her from bottles to sippy cups in preparation for the toddler room at her new day care.  There were only a few times during this period that she asked to breastfeed during the day, but she was usually satisfied by an offer of coconut milk, and if not, we could distract her with something else.  We did suffer a bit of a setback when she was sick in Oregon-- since she was dehydrated, and didn't want to do anything but nurse, I let her nurse whenever she wanted for those few days.  Then she returned to day care and wanted to be nursing literally from the minute I picked her up until the minute I put her down to bed.  That transition was hard on all of us, but thankfully it only lasted a few days.  Once she felt comfortable at school, she no longer needed to nurse during the day, so we were back to nursing at wake-up and bedtime.

In early February I was getting tired of nursing, so I started offering Nora coconut milk in the morning. If she wanted to nurse after she finished the coconut milk I would let her, but that only lasted about a week.  I thought my supply would dry up fairly quickly at that point, but we continued nursing for 10-15 minutes before bed until about two weeks ago.  At that point, we had put her down to bed without nursing a few times here and there, and she didn't have any trouble getting to sleep.  Nursing before bed still seemed to be comforting to her, but I didn't think she needed to do it, and I was ready to be done.  So I just decided which night would be our last, spent that nursing session reflecting on how fortunate we are that weaning happened fairly naturally, and then the next night I just rocked her and put her right to bed.  She hasn't shown any indication that she misses it, and although I do feel a little nostalgic for when she was a baby, and nursing is tied up in those emotions, I am glad to be done.  She has been gleaning nutrients from my body, at varying levels, for over two years.  Although I couldn't be happier about being able to provide those nutrients and their benefits to her, I am proud that we are continuing to foster her developing independence and happy to have my body back to myself.

Since we were changing her bedtime routine slightly, we also ditched the sleep sacks she has been using since she was four months old.  Now she gets tucked in under her very own crib quilt, which I made her.  This was a fun little project for me, and since she's no longer making use of my breastmilk, I like thinking that she's tucked under something else I made with love just for her.  : )