Let The Weaning Begin!

Tonight I officially began weaning Tai off the boobies. Yes, after almost 15 months, I am ready to be done nursing. [If you are someone I gave funny looks to when you nursed your baby for more than 8 or 9 months, insert smug comment here. I deserve it.]

After plotting and planning for a couple weeks, wondering how best to approach it, I found some useful advice in a book a friend gave me. Mind you, this was a La Leche League book, so the vast majority of the text is dedicated to why you should not "force" your baby to wean, but let it happen naturally, usually between the ages of 2 and 4. (Hey, extended nursing works for some folks, but I think I'm just about at my limit.) Finally, about 100 pages into the book, they give up on convincing you not to wean and give some pretty reasonable advice about how to approach weaning (if you must).

The book offers a couple different tactics and I've selected one called "don't ask, don't tell". Oh, wait. That's an entirely different issue. What I meant to say is "don't offer, don't refuse." The theory is that if Tai asks to nurse, I let him. But I don't offer unless he asks. He's been nursing just twice a day for a couple months now and it occurred to me that each night at bedtime I just automatically whip out the boob as part of our routine. So tonight I waited for him to ask for it.

And he didn't.

I rocked him and sang to him and he sucked on his pacifier, and he fell asleep on my arms. Now we'll see if he wakes up in a couple hours asking for milk. If he does, I'll oblige. And we'll go from there....