The Final Stages of Weaning

I am very proud to be able to say that I breastfed my daughter for the first 19 months of her life. I set out in the very beginning with the goal of reaching 18 months and luckily was able to achieve that goal without any complications. The length of time for which a mother decides to breastfeed is a very personal choice and there are a number of factors that go into making the decision to stop. Sadly, there are many mothers out there that would love to have breastfed for a longer period of time, but for whatever reason, were not able to. My heart goes out to those mothers and I applaud every mother that makes an attempt at breastfeeding regardless of how long they decide to do it for.

People have asked me what it was like to nurse an 18 month old, how I went about weaning, and whether weaning was a challenging experience. So, here goes…

Nursing an 18 months old…
I really think that the personality of the child has a huge impact on whether a mother can continue to breastfeed well into the second year of life. My daughter is a calm, cuddly child and was easy to breastfeed until 19 months. She was always gentle, never really begged for it or pulled on my clothing, and never really made it an issue. When I think about baby #2 and the possibility that it could be a rambunctious boy, I wonder if I will be able to nurse for as long.

The weaning process…
I was consistently nursing my daughter 3 times a day (morning, after nap, night). This had been our schedule for months and months and I was really worried about weaning as a result. My daughter always seemed very attached to nursing. After waking in the morning and from her nap, that would be the first and ONLY thing she wanted to do. If there was even the slightest bit of deviation from the routine, she would be get upset. In addition, I had never put her to bed at night without nursing her and worried that she would no longer go to bed easily. Needless to say, I was anxious about the whole weaning process. Let me just say, I had nothing to be anxious about because it was significantly easier than I ever expected it to be. Perhaps we were just both ready, but I was unwilling to admit that it was time for that particular aspect of our mother-daughter relationship to come to an end.

I decided to start by weaning my daughter from the after-nap nursing session as I thought this would be the easiest one to drop. Looking back, this was actually the most challenging one to get rid of. We happened to be staying with my parents at the time so I decided to have my mom get Lilah up from her nap for a few days while I stayed hidden until she seemed to be over the fact that I wasn’t going to nurse her. Our strategy was to get her a snack right away, something she really enjoyed, in an attempt to get her mind off of nursing. The first day was the hardest because she cried and asked for me and for milk, but my mom was able to distract her and she got over it in a relatively short period of time. The next couple of days were similar, but each day it seemed easier to distract her. By the fourth day, I was getting her up from her nap again and everything was fine. She did ask for it a few times and I simply told her that I didn’t have any milk for her and that she would have to wait until bedtime and this response seemed sufficient.

I had intended on keeping her morning and night feedings for several more weeks, but a few short weeks later, I inadvertently forgot to nurse her one night. About an hour after I had put her to bed, I realized that I had forgot and then realized that she didn’t ask for it, it didn’t take her any longer to fall asleep…nothing. I decided to run with it and just stopped feeding her at night. We had been giving her a cup of milk during bedtime stories for several weeks so nursing was more of a comfort thing than anything else. It almost made sense that she didn’t seem to care that it wasn’t happening anymore. Regardless. I really was very surprised that it was so easy.

I was convinced that getting rid of the morning feeding would be the hardest on both of us because we had a really nice routine of getting her out of her crib, bringing her to our room, nursing her and cuddling in bed for awhile before we had to get up for the day. I think I was the one that was dreading dropping this feeding because it would mean I would have to hop out of bed and get right to making breakfast rather than slowly waking up in bed. Anyway, I decided to bite the bullet and once again, was surprised at how easy it all was. My daughter didn’t really seem to care that I wasn’t nursing her anymore and was perfectly content to hang out for an hour or so before I gave her breakfast. One of the wonderful outcomes of dropping the morning feeding was that Lilah started to sleep longer. She had been waking around 6am for weeks and some mornings would be up even earlier than that. Once I dropped the morning feeding, she started sleeping longer and longer and for the past several weeks has consistently been sleeping until 7am or later. It may be a coincidence that she is sleeping longer, but I really think the two are at least somewhat related.

In the end, weaning was probably more difficult for me than it was for my daughter. I really think we were both ready for it even if one of us didn’t want to admit it…not mentioning any names. The pregnancy did play a role in speeding up the process, but it would have happened anyway. It was a sad day when I nursed her for the last time, but I will cherish the 19 months we did have for the rest of my life and I very much look forward to going through it all again in 6 months time!