It's been almost 2 weeks so I just wanted to make it official. Huck never shed a single tear over weaning. I didn't think that would ever be possible. It was truly the right time. I feel so great about it and incredibly happy that we had such a wonderful nursing relationship and that I was able to breastfeed him for so long.
When I first started out I intended to nurse for 6 months and see how it went. Well, it went horribly for the first 10 weeks. He was an immediate good nurser, but I got engorged and there was something off in his latch. I started having problems within the first 2 weeks. Engorgement, sore nipples, plugged ducts, cracked nipples, blanching, pain, 2 bouts of Mastitis. Honestly, it was sheer stubbornness that kept me going. That and the fact that I had watched my sister-in-law nurse and knew it could be a calm & pleasant experience.
She and my midwife both assured me that it could take 6-10 weeks for things to even out and become normal for me. And I trusted them both. There were times I almost threw in the towel and times I wept when it was time for feeding and begged Stephen to jolly Huck through another 30 minutes so I wouldn't have to nurse him yet, but I always came back to the idea that eventually my nipples would heal, I'd break through the pain and things would normalize.
And they did. Right at around 10 week.
Once I reached 6 months, it seemed like such a hard won battle and I found it so much easier than washing bottles, that I kept going.
Then I told myself I'd go to a year and see what happened. What happened was there just wasn't any reason to stop. That's how I looked at it from very early on--when the question came up about why I was still nursing I always thought, that's the wrong question. It should be, tell me why should I stop? Stephen jokes that he doesn't understand how on earth people survive parenthood without breastfeeding, "It's like playing chess without your queen!"
Eventually, I just got out of my head about it and turned the decision over to Huck or my body, whichever made the decision first. There were times between Huck being 1 and 2 when either he would get busy and stop asking for milk at a certain time or I would feel an overwhelming urge for a tad more autonomy. When those times happened I went with it.
Even after I got pregnant I was considering tandem nursing. But my body started having a really strong negative reaction to nursing as the weeks went on. I was almost repulsed by it. I probably could have powered through--I mean I got through those first 10 week! But I decided to look at it as a message from my body telling me it was time to wean and to shift my body's resources to the new baby.
I ceratinly worried about whether it was the right thing to do. Huck taking it so easily has been a real gift and kept me from second guessing.
In our new About Mammals book, there's a page explaining that baby mammals drink milk from their mothers with a picture of a cute little orange bison nursing. When I first read that page to Huck I was a little worried it would set off our first fit of begging.
It didn't.
I read the page and told him what the baby bison was doing and he cuddled in close and grinned the sweetest grin ever, and said, "He habing mommy milk."
