Weaning

Lola and I have been fortunate to have a wonderful breastfeeding relationship.  She took to it easily at the beginning, and we developed a nice routine, never really having any issues (save for one bout of mastitis and some biting issues).  She's never had formula - she only had my milk until six months, when we introduced solids, and then she started drinking cow's milk at one year.  I feel very lucky that we were able to achieve my goal of breastfeeding for one year.

However, it has come time to wean Lola.  I didn't have a set end date in mind; I just knew I wanted to go until one year and then I'd see how things went.  Well, it seems like Lola doesn't really need my milk anymore. She eats a TON of food and is slowly starting to like cow's milk, so she's getting all the nutrients she needs.  The nursing now is really just for comfort or out of habit.  So I decided to start the weaning process.

Lola had been nursing (or drinking expressed breast milk from a bottle) five times a day - around 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm, and 7pm. The week we were at the beach with the Breuers (July 27), I dropped the 4pm feed, so that she was just nursing in the morning, before naps, and bedtime.  The following week was her first week at daycare, so we kept her at four feedings and sent two bottles to school.  The teachers said she didn't seem too interested in the bottles (she was the only one in her class still taking bottles), so the following week we dropped the 10am feeding.  We did that for two weeks, and then dropped the 1pm feeding as well, so that she no longer had bottles at school.  The teachers said she didn't seem to notice at all.  I think it helped having her older classmates drinking cow's milk - she wanted to be like them.

So we've been at two feedings a day for four weeks now, just in the morning and at bedtime.  Lola still nurses fine, but I can tell she's losing interest and doesn't really need it - she finishes pretty quickly.  I think I'm ready to stop, so I decided to cut out her bedtime feeding on Tuesday.  It did NOT go well.  Apparently it is still an important part of her routine.  So instead, Wednesday morning Joseph got her up and fed her breakfast, and we skipped the morning nursing.  She seemed to be fine with that, and has been fine every day since.

Tonight I moved her bedtime nursing to before bath (we used to do bath, nurse, books, bed) so that she hopefully disassociates nursing with going to bed.  It went well and she went to sleep without any trouble.  I'll do that for a few more nights, and then hopefully we can drop the bedtime nursing.  We will replace it with cow's milk or water, depending on what she wants.

I have mixed emotions about this.  If you know me well, you won't be surprised that I've made up a pros and cons list in my head:

Pros

• Freedom!  I've been nursing or pumping 5+ times a day for the past year.  It will be nice not to have to worry about doing that every 3 hours.
• No more pumping (and all the cleaning of parts and bottles that go along with it).  I pumped three times a day every work day for almost nine months.  Sometimes I enjoyed the little break from work, but mostly it was a huge pain.
• No more leaking.
• Joseph can help out more.  I used to have to be involved in every morning wake-up and every bedtime.

Cons

• My baby is growing up.
• No more guaranteed snuggle time.
• When will I read my Facebook feed and Kindle books? :)
• I'll have to start paying attention to what I eat.  The breastfeeding diet has been awesome!
• My chest will shrink back to it's normal pre-pregnancy size (or smaller, based on what I'm seeing).

Cross your fingers that dropping this final feed goes well!

(This turned into a super long post - sorry.  I wanted to document the process so I remember for the next baby!)