- Pregnancy
- Baby & Toddler
- Parents
- Getting Pregnant
- Baby Names
- Product Reviews
-
Registry
- Community
-
More
Want a personalized experience?
Download the free app
Attachment Parenting
penguinem
member
Weaning guilt and questions
penguinem
member
Hi all!
I usually am a quiet paricipant on this board, but I need a bit of support/ advice. I am 11 wks pregnant (yay!) and still nursing my two year old, only once before bed. She has severe food allergies to milk, wheat, and peanuts and treenuts so my diet is restricted. I was SO hoping she would self wean, esp after I got pregnant, but I truly don't think that's going to happen. I know I don't have to wean, but I am having so many cravings and so much nausea, I want to. Plus, I know with our lifestyle (I have a crazy busy job and DH is a SAHD 
tandem nursing won't be feasible for me. This is where the guilt comes in!!!! My plan is to take her down to once on each side and stay there for a week or two (right now she does twice) and then make a big deal out of picking out a new cup and switch to a small cup of soymilk with a new reading/snuggles routine before bed. How does this sound? Any tips? Reasurrance?
Thanks! Emily
tandem nursing won't be feasible for me. This is where the guilt comes in!!!! My plan is to take her down to once on each side and stay there for a week or two (right now she does twice) and then make a big deal out of picking out a new cup and switch to a small cup of soymilk with a new reading/snuggles routine before bed. How does this sound? Any tips? Reasurrance?
Thanks! Emily 
This discussion has been closed.
Re: Weaning guilt and questions
Nursing is tough when YOU don't feel good about it anymore, either physically or emotionally. I don't have any good tips for dealing with the guilt because I still have pangs of guilt every once in a while that I didn't let DD self-wean, but I just knew it was the right time for me to wean her. I didn't want to grow to resent her or the time I was spending nursing her, and that's the thought that kept me going with the weaning process.
Ultimately, part of my guilt was this weird attachment to a vision that just didn't correspond to reality. I get this way about other issues in my life, going down the guilt path when I can't make things work out the way I had dreamed about (jobs, relationships with certain family members, etc). But I've had to realize that it's more about re-envisioning things and toning down my own expectations of myself. No one expected me to let DD self-wean except for me, but answering to myself was hard. Good luck to you.
My DD has food allergies as well and we nursed for 28mos. I applaud you for making it 11 weeks into pregnancy on a restricted diet. I always said we would not TTC while DD was nursing, I wouldn't have been able to do it.
DD last nursed around the middle of May and it was way harder on me than it was for her. We too were down to one session a day, usually, for several months. I went on a work trip and when I got back she was frustrated that there wasn't any milk. I figured at that point we were done. She had gone 6 days without nursing already... She cried for less than 10 minutes and then asked to go to her crib. I cried every night when I put her to bed for at least 2 weeks.
I would talk to your DD about your nursing relationship. I would talk about it a lot. I explained to DD, months before we weaned, that "someday you will grow up and not need Mama's milk. We will always have our cuddle and love." She started to tell me "when I goooo up, cuddles, no milk". She wasn't 100% ready, but she understood it in her own way.
I can tell you though that there is light at the end of the emotional tunnel of weaning. In the end I was really surprised by how well DD did and I can now reflect fondly upon nursing without bursting into tears (unless I'm PMSing! :-) ).
:-( . I don't think that by the time her sibling arrives she will associate the baby nursing with her not nursing. DD almost seems to have forgotten about nursing. She is still curious about my breasts but I recently asked her how we used to go to sleeep and she just looked at me with a blank stare. She remembers tiny details from months ago and would talk about nursing for the first month but it seems very far removed from her mind now.
I'm sure pregnancy hormones are not helping. Hang in there and good luck with everything.
We started very gradually, around 18 months I stopped nursing DD to sleep and that was a big first step. Around 20 or 21 months, I tried dropping our daytime session and that didn't work at all. The order of everything is a little jumbled in my recollection now, but I distinctly remember that any progress I had achieved was ruined by our trip to Cuba when DD was 22 months old. I let her nurse anytime, anywhere while there simply because we had no routine or schedule like we did at home and even our meal times were all over the place due to visiting family. We were bedsharing while there, too, so she started nursing to sleep again. When we came back, I was exhausted and wanted to fast-track the weaning. I took about a week to get us back to our 3 times/day nursing and then a month to tackle each separate nursing session. Bedtime/evening was the first to go. I had already moved her pre-bedtime nursing to after bath and before books. I moved it back to before bath, then before dinner and then just stopped nursing her in the evening at all.
At a little over 23 months, I started really working on the daytime session and DD ended up dropping her nap as a result. She never went back to napping. I have no idea if it was really that no nursing= no napping or if she would have dropped her nap even sooner if we hadn't been nursing so long. I could drive myself nuts analyzing it, but I decided to just accept the result and move on.
By 24 months, we were down to just the morning wake-up nursing and this is when I really started talking to DD a lot about weaning (I had been talking to her about it already all along). I considered things like promising her an "end of nursing" party and some other ideas I saw online (kellymom) and in other places when I googled "weaning a toddler." However, the talking seemed to sink in and one day, when DD was 25 months old, we visited a friend who was nursing her newborn. Something clicked for DD and she didn't ask to nurse the next day.
The end was not as hard as the middle. Dropping the daytime session was the hardest because DD was still nursing and didn't understand why she could nurse as soon as she woke up, but not later in the day.
we just weaned two weeks ago, at 2.5 years old. (it's funny, cuz anna & HarpersMom and i always seem to reply to posts about toddler weaning, LOL!)
i think your plan to go to once per side for a couple of weeks is a great start. is she nursing all the way to sleep? we broke that habit for nighttime a long time ago just because DD refused to nurse to sleep anymore, go figure. after nursing we would lay down together in her queen bed. i would close my eyes and remind her it was time to sleep, sometimes she'd play with her stuffed animals or ask to sleep on top of me, lol, but she knew i would not play with her or nurse anymore by the time we were in bed. if she was really fussy i woudl stand up and sing her a song, but after one song she knew we would go back to bed and stay there.
we were like that for so long, i thought she was going to have a huge problem with stopping altogether. but the opposite was true - she was totally fine - i think because she already had the skills to fall asleep without it, so it wasnt that big of a deal for her to cut it out of the bedtime routine. everything else has stayed the same, so that helps too i think.
and of course yes talk to her about it a ton. we bought my DD a pet fish when she weaned, and she totally understands that. she knows milk is for babies, and it doesn't bother her or make her jealous, we just explain that tiny babies can't eat real food like we can so it's very important for them to nurse. our very good friends have a newborn and i thought she'd be triggered by seeing the baby nurse but actually she loves it!! it's almost like the passing of the torch, LOL, like "ohh ok the baby can nurse now, i'm done cuz i'm a big girl".
good luck with weaning and with the new little one on the way!!!