Breastfeeding & weaning

Hey, Joahaeyo! Nice to see you.

I can understand feeling sad when you weaned him. We tried it *one* night, and I was felt it.

How did you wean your son? Did you follow a plan? A book?

STILL no pictures in this thread? Damn.

lol kicky

I replaced the middle of the night feeding w/formula (that I left by my bedside at night). That seemed to be the only time he would not care he was getting formula instead of milk.

Then the next week, I took away the lunch feeding w/formula.

We were down to 2 feedings a day. That is when it got the hardest.

I think it hurt me more than him, as far as moving down to one feeding. If he didn't take his formula, I had to tell myself OVER AND OVER again that "he's not going to starve himself." We went through this period for 2 weeks ...where he barely would drink his lunch formula. Many days he didn't drink it at all. Oh well, I told myself. Then offered him water.

So on the third week, I just said "if I don't get rid of this last feeding, then I never will."

...and we started whole milk!

kickycan

Hey Joahaeyo - thanks for writing in. Can imagine the stress of it. Good for you for sticking through with it.

Still waiting for my book (the one Sozobe suggested earlier in the thread) to arrive....

One thing that helped us -- and I can't remember where I got the idea, might be in the Pantley book -- was the idea of "skin snuggling." While a lot of the benefits of breastfeeding have to do with the actual milk, there are also a lot of benefits to just the skin-to-skin contact and bonding. So around when sozlet was being weaned we did a LOT of snuggling, including skin-to-skin contact, and that always calmed her down a lot in the same way that breastfeeding used to. Definitely helped with the transition.

Nice idea. Makes sense that she would find it comforting.

Will definitely keep that in mind.

Revisiting weaning.

It's been a crazy sort of year so far, though nothing unexpected.

This the second week that M's fallen asleep without nursing. Yay! It happened rather weirdly, actually. One night last week, she was a little spooked by the upstairs neighbors walking around. It's cool outside now, the aircon's turned off, so lot more sounds filter through. Anyway. She got spooked. Instead of nursing, she turned her back towards me to spoon/snuggle, clutched doggy to herself and fell asleep. Same thing the following night. (With me saying - it's okay, baby, nothing to be afraid of, Mommy's right here, etc.) And thus it has continued since.
She wakes up ~2/3 AM wanting to briefly nurse (mostly to make sure that I'm next to her), or to feed if she's had a bad food day. Definitely, the better the dinner she eats, the briefer her nursing/feeding.

This is 'interview week' for B, so have to keep night disruptions at a minimum for him. From next week, I think I'm going to slowly start trying to give her water (or maybe milk) from a sippy cup. The couple times I tried last week to just pat/cuddle her back to sleep when she woke up at the 2/3 AM time, there were major tears - so it'll definitely be more uphill than the initial falling asleep period, I'm sure. Still, I'm feeling hopeful. And quite encouraged.

That's great, _Heatwave_!

I definitely found that replacing nursing times with snuggle times helped. I think by that point it's 90% about close physical contact and 10% about food.