Dropping a Night Feed

My daughter hit the 8 month mark. I can't believe it! Time is flying by so quickly! The lack of sleep is also finally catching up with me. I have been tired ever since I started having to get up to pee several times a night when I was pregnant...if we do the math that means I have been tired for the past 17 months! However, it was only recently that I started to feel truly exhausted! As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have never been a napper and have rarely taken naps since Lilah was born. Over the last few weeks, naps have been essential.

It is the case that nursing mothers tend to find they are more exhausted during their baby's second half of the first year. There are a number of reasons for this:

1) Our baby's become more active and, therefore, we become more active, but we don't make up for it by resting any more than we had been resting.

2) Menstruation returns for many women in the second half of the first year when baby becomes more reliant on solid foods and is nursing less. I was lucky to have 8 period-free months, but alas this is now contributing to my lack of energy!

3) Many mothers pay less attention to what they are eating as time goes on and/or decide it is time to lose some weight and eat less. However, because we are still nursing, we need to continue to fuel our bodies properly so that milk production does not drop off.

As an aside...in a recent post I talked about the common drop in milk production many women experience around the 7 month mark. Shortly after writing that post, I started menstruating again which helped explain why I was having trouble producing enough milk. I failed to mention in that post that the return of menses is a very common cause of low milk production. It tends to be the case that your milk supply will drop most drastically before your first cycle and for some women it many continue to drop before each cycle.

Anyway, back to the main reason for my exhaustion...My daughter was still waking 3 times a night to nurse. She goes to bed at 7:00pm and would wake to nurse around 10:00pm, 1:00am, and 4:00am and then wake for the day between 6:00am and 7:00am. I was fine continuing with this schedule up until a few weeks ago when the extreme exhaustion set in.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it is completely normal for a breastfed baby to wake 1-3 times per night well into the second year of life if they continue to breastfeed. Now that my daughter has been eating 3 solid meals a day, however, I decided that I would like to attempt to get her to drop one of her night feedings. I am happy to continue nursing her 1-2 times a night for the time being, but I no longer feel 3 feedings is necessary given that she is a good eater during the day (nursing 4-5 times and eating 3 solids meals and occasionally a small snack).

As I am not a fan of any kind of cry-it-out sleep approach, my husband and I decided that we would simply try to gradually stretch the time between feedings by comforting Lilah in other ways (ie. rocking her). I was prepared for this to take some time, but after only a few rough nights we have now had 2 nights in a row during which she only woke to nurse at 10:00pm and 2:30am! This is still a work in progress because she is still waking in the night at other times, but she is getting better at putting herself back to sleep (we are now trying to eliminate the rocking and letting her try to fall back asleep on her own which has been successful).

I think that after a few weeks of nursing only twice a night, I would like to attempt to get Lilah to drop yet another feeding so that she is nursing only once each night ideally right before I head off to bed (10:00pm). As she consumes more and more solid foods, I will feel more comfortable doing this.

My ultimate goal is to continue to breastfeed until she is a year old. I may continue for longer, but at that point, I would only like to be nursing once in the morning and once before bed. This gives us a few months to gradually wean her off of night feedings altogether. Wish me luck and good luck to all of the parents out there that are feeling as exhausted as I am!