Um, I Think We Are Weaning

We had been down to nursing about twice a day, sometime in the early morning (because that was my tool to lull her back to sleep at 4 am so I could get a couple more hours of sleep) and once in the late afternoon (because while my kitchen was torn apart we were on Nan and Grandpa's dinner schedule which was later than she needed, so a nursing tended to fill in the gap.)

I was planning to start gradually.  I was going to start setting some boundaries to limit the times/places we nursed.  I wasn't going to nurse out in public anymore.  I was only going to nurse at home in the living room, not in her bedroom or other places.  I had already started substituting a cup of juice whenever she would ask for the late afternoon nursing, and once my kitchen was back together we started eating dinner about when we walked in the door, so that helped.

I had gone a little backwards on the nighttime nursing, tho.  Especially since she's been sick so much, nursing when she wakes at night was my go-to parenting tool for getting her comforted and back to sleep in a somewhat timely way.

So at 5:00 Thursday morning, when I was nursing her for the second time that night, and I wasn't sure I had enough milk, I thought "you know, I need to work on the weaning thing."

So imagine my surprise ... that was the last time we have nursed.

At the end of The Milk Memos there is a story a mama tells about going into her son's room to nurse him for the last time.  When I first read that, she was only a few months old and I had a very physical emotional reaction to reading that.  I couldn't imagine a time when I wouldn't be nursing her.

But I always imagined our last time nursing would go the same way, we'd sit in the rocker and nurse, and look into each other's eyes and I'd try really hard not to cry.

So I'm quite disappointed that our last nursing (if this continues) was me being annoyed at 5:00 in the morning that she was in my bed and not going back to sleep.

She made the sign to nurse yesterday afternoon, and I gave her a cup and then fed her a snack.  She didn't ask today.  That's not how I wanted it to end.  But I feel like I need to keep going this direction.