nursing story
There was no way I wasn’t going to breastfeed my baby. I scoffed when someone gave me onesies rolled up in bottles as a gift when I was pregnant. My own mom breastfed me until I was 22 months, including during part of her pregnancy with my little sister (who nursed until she was 26 months).
My baby was born at home after a long labor, but a fast actual delivery (he went from not crowning to completely born in one push). He screamed for at least an hour, including through the whole first session the midwives tried to help me to get him to latch. He finally did latch about 1.5 hours after birth, but this wasn’t enough to get the placenta out, so we ended up spending some time in the hospital and then again back to the hospital when he was four weeks old because I had an infection (likely picked up during my first trip when my placenta was manually removed!) and my platelet count had bottomed out so I was at risk of hemmorage. Luckily, I was able to keep my baby with me through my five days in hospital and the nurses even helped me change my sheets at 3 o’clock in the morning when there was explosive breastfed-baby-on-antibiotics poo all over them.
All through his early months, I just instinctively nursed him whenever he cried. But sometimes he cried when I nursed him, which would involve gasping and coughing and milk spraying everywhere. I still leaked and got unsolicited let downs until he was a year old, but some positioning advice from a LLL leader mostly put a stop to the gasping/choking.
I think I was lucky in that everyone I knew having babies around the same time was also breastfeeding and the local LLL group is really friendly and supportive, so I never felt ‘the odd one out’ or embarrassed or shy about feeding my baby.
We ran into a hiccup at 12 weeks, when, from seemingly out of the blue, my baby started to refuse to nurse if we were out. So there we were, with my leaky overactive breasts and a baby who was all of a sudden too busy watching the world go by to eat! The first time it happened, I was really worried and came home soaked. The kid had gone for 6.5 hours without nursing! (Why couldn’t he do that at night?!) So I had to learn to encourage his nursings around when we would be home, always offering before we went anywhere. I also finally got the hang of nursing in the sling, again thanks to one of my LLL leaders.
My kid really wouldn’t nurse in public again until it might have been considered time to wean. At about 11 months, he started using the sign for “milk” and then, probably because he figured out a nifty way to ask for it, he started asking all the time, public or not! Again, I count myself lucky in that I was never asked to move or so much as given a dirty look breastfeeding my toddler in public.
I went back to work four half days a week when my baby was 10.5 months old, and because he normally would have nursed to sleep for a nap during that time, I pumped in an empty office until he was just over 12 months. By then it became clear that he wasn’t interested in having expressed milk and we had a huge amount in the freezer, so I stopped.
We night weaned at 14 months using an adapted version of the Jay Gordon method, but essentially nursed on demand until my little boy was about 26 months. In his second year, he went from nursing 4-6 times a day to 2-3 times a day. By that point, after he had turned 2, I felt like it was time to cut out the sometimes-third nursing, when he might or might not fall asleep for an afternoon nap. A few months before, I loved the convenience of knowing this session would put him to sleep, but as it became less reliable as a soporific, it made me more and more antsy and I wanted to stop. I talked to my son about ‘only having mama milk in the morning when we wake up and in the evening when we go to sleep’ and with only a few requests for afternoon milk over the next couple of weeks, we transitioned very smoothly to twice-a-day nursing.
Maybe because we were trying to get pregnant again or maybe because it was just time, the two remaining nursing sessions we had became more and more uncomfortable for me but were also surprisingly easy for my little boy to let go of on his own terms. Starting in his 27th month, he would skip nursing in the morning occasionally. Up to that point, the first thing I would hear every morning was, “Mama milk in chair!” (We had stopped nursing in bed, so I would get up and sit in the comfy chair in the living room for that session.) But that month, several times, by the time I got myself to the designated chair, the request changed to “Mama play trains.” Also in that month, for the first time I was met with “No mama milk, milk in cup!” at bedtime. We had about two months of sometimes yes, sometimes no morning and evening nursing sessions before he weaned. The last proper nursing he had was in the morning, which surprised me because he hadn’t asked to nurse in the morning for over a week, the day he hit 28 months. He asked 2 or 3 times in the month following, but each time either didn’t latch on or did latch on and then announce, “No milk!” I feel really pleased with how our nursing relationship drew to a close.