Weaning…or not, as the case may be.

I have said many times before that my desire to nurse pretty much goes down the tubes at around 3yo. So naturally I’ve begun the whole weaning process with Abigail. There’s just one problem. She is NOT at all ready. AT. ALL. *sigh* Naturally, I’m not entirely sure what to do, now.

See, I think part of the problem is that her milkies were inadvertently and rather suddenly cut off when my supply tanked after the fiasco that was Ethan’s nursing relationship*. It’s not like she is or was nursing much, once or twice a day tops. She always nurses before bed and every now and then (like this morning) she asks for a cuddle nurse. The thing is that I have no milk. Abby tells me that there’s nothing in there but if she tries, it will come. It’s heart breaking. She loves it. Last night before bed she said, “Milkies?” and then started smacking her lips and going “num num num!”. We also had a short session yesterday in the living room and she was humming along to herself, quite happily, as she nursed. She’s been doing that for the last two years. As a baby she was all about the EATING part of nursing and then she was done. While we were in NY, though, right around a year or so old, she really got attached to it emotionally. I guess I didn’t realize just HOW attached she was because she was never a nurse a hundred times a day kid, like Morgan was. Abby only asks a few times a day, like I said, and most days she only nurses once.

I tried telling her we were cutting it out and she didn’t throw a fit about nursing, instead she threw a fit about a stuffed animal like five minutes later. Her entire demeanor changed, she was frustrated, angry, hurt. I asked her what was wrong and she just shrugged. I know that Abigail is SO much like me (in that she’s likely to suppress her rejected feelings project them onto something else) that I decided she must be upset about the mikies so I asked her if she was upset about that and she started to SOB. I hadn’t actually cut it out yet, I just told her that it was the last night! So I back-pedaled and asked her if she thought she was ready to stop having milkies. She said she was a big girl and NOT a baby but that she wanted to keep her milkies.

The bottom line is that she’s not ready and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I don’t believe in forced weaning, particularly in a child that still is too young to really articulate their feelings and too young to understand complicated concepts like, “People will think Mommy is weird if she keeps nursing a 3yo without any milk”. Yes, I admit it, that’s part of my reason for wishing to wean. The other trouble is that nursing without milk isn’t comfortable. The other OTHER reason is that nursing a 3yo is nothing like nursing a baby or even a toddler. Nursing a child this age means nursing a child who has forgotten (as part of the natural course of things) all about let-down and deep eating. So her latch sucks (tee-hee! I made a funny!). She only does the quick flutter nursing which would be FINE except it doesn’t require a deep latch which means her TEETH start to grate on me, literally. I can’t describe the sensation. It starts out as barely noticeable and by the end I’m doing breathing exercises to keep myself from clawing my own face off.

The thing is, upon close inspection, you’ll notice that every single one of the reasons I want to wean are all about MY needs. And well, Abigail needs to continue nursing right now. I wish I knew WHY, though. If I could figure out something we could do together to replace it (like I did when I weaned Morgan) it would make life much easier. But so far I’ve not found anything. Thankfully, she rarely nurses long and if I do let her have a bit during the day, she stops when I ask her to. Still, I can’t help but wonder how long this is going to go on!

That and it makes me sad to think about it anyway. I feel badly that her milkies dried up all of the sudden. That wasn’t fair to her. I’m also kind of sad that it’s time to think about weaning. I didn’t think Abby would be my last nursling and it looks like she might be. It’s bitter-sweet, when they start to grow up, lol.

Me nursing Morgan and Abigail.  Morgan is 3yo and Abigail is maybe a week old.

I am still sad that Ethan only got 4ish months of nursing. I still feel kind of like he got the short end of the stick.

Anyway, Morgan was 3.5 when she was ready to let it go so let’s see how this year goes, eh?

* Ethan was born with a tongue tie. At first,we thought it was just in the front so we had that clipped and went about our business, nursing on demand as usual. But it slowly became obvious that he wasn’t gaining any weight. In the end he was diagnosed with FTT and hospitalized. Turns out, his tongue tie is so severe that the webbing under his tongue extends all the way back and as a result, he cannot latch properly. He was unable to to nurse effectively and the effort was exhausting him. I tried pumping but ended up pumping, feeding, pumping, feeding 8hrs a day and with two other small children and STILL having to supplement (cuz my breasticles don’t like pumps) I just couldn’t make that work. So now he’s formula fed and the process of pumping unfortunately just killed my supply altogether. So from Abby’s perspective, there was milk and now there isn’t.