Ramblings

Saturday, July 16, 2005

We are starting the weaning process. It's been a week now and it's actually been going very well. Instead of nursing her pretty much whenever, we've limited it to three or four times a day for a period of 10 minutes maximum. My OBGYN suggested I stop nursing by my seventh month of pregnancy and I'm right now at 19 weeks (almost five months). I made the choice to finally start trying after a period of about an hour where she'd fall asleep so I'd detatch and she'd wake up screaming. After trying this three or four times, I was frustrated. I immediately found this book my mom bought when she started breastfeeding me over 29 years ago called Nursing Your Baby by Karen Pryor.

One thing I really took from the passages on weaning your toddler and tandum nursing was the idea of resentment. She wrote that your toddler can sense being resented (for wanting to nurse even though the mother might be tired from nursing the newborn) and that children can tolerate being told they can't nurse better than knowing the mother resents them for wanting to nurse. A similar idea stated that if either the mother or child started resenting the process of nursing, it wasn't healthy to continue. Hopefully, she found studies to prove this, but even if not, I can understand her logic.

I enjoy nursing Claire, but I've noticed I've been tired and do get frustrated when she hangs on forever. Now I lay her down on her bed before her nap and at night after ten minutes of nursing often times when she's awake.
She's seemed to have accepted that we're nursing for shorter periods and that I'll tell her no when she asks to nurse because it's convenient. I've had to substitute more meals of real food for her, but that's good for me even if it is more work. We're going to make it, but it is an interesting and growing process for both of us...

¶ 9:14 PM

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