At what age did your kid(s) quit taking a bottle? Did you phase it out or just stop one day?
If you were still nursing and pumping at a year-- how did you do it? Did you decrease pumping over time or just quit? Did you quit bottles first but keep nursing? Did you keep pumping but put the milk in a sippy? Someone give me some ideas of how this works.
Re: Talk to me about bottles, pumping and weaning...
DS was completely off the bottle at around 11 months. We started replacing 1 bottle a day with a sippy cup. When we saw that he had no issues with the sippy cup we cut out the last bottle. I don't really remember how gradual this was. We started "working" with a sippy cup at 6 months but it wasn't until closer to 10/11 months that we really concentrated on giving him one.
I slowly weaned off of pumping. I think at 8 months I cut out one of my 3 pumping sessions. At 9 months I did another and at 10 months I cut out the last. I did keep up with morning and night time nursing until DS was almost 1. I think I just went cold turkey on the morning and night time nursings but I don't think he was getting that much at that point anyway.
At our 9 month appt. our pedi suggested to us to try and move to cups so I went home and put all the bottles into a bag and put them away in the closet and that was that. We did this with both girls and had let them start to play with cups around 6 months. They were not very proficient at it but once we put bm in it they figured it out pretty quickly. : )
With R I started to wean after she turned 1. I started by cutting out the pumping sessions and we started working in whole milk. I cut the pumping/during the day sessions first and left the am/pm ones to last. With A I did the same technique but weaned her by her 1st bday.
Crazy Christmas Kids!
E never took a bottle and just started using cups around 11mo. I wasn't pumping, but kept BFing until 16mo
With S, so far he's still taking a bottle sometimes, but not often (more an emergency backup if he melts down when I'm away). But he still nurses a lot. I stopped pumping at 10mo, but I was only a p/t pumper anyways.
While I think it's somewhat important to get my kids off a bottle around a year, I don't want to wean, so I'm not. Do you want to keep nursing at night but stop pumping? You can probably do it, your body should adjust.
If you pump a lot right now I would drop a pump session and maybe pump for a shorter time for the other sessions. If you already don't pump a whole lot then just stop doing it (which is what I did).
Oh, and DS nurses, gets cow milk in a bottle and cow milk in a sippy and doesn't seem to object to any of them.