And then there was none

After 369 days, my boobs are now my own again. The boy subleasing them for the last year is weaned. And I think I am OK with it.

My goal was to breastfeed him for a year. And I accomplished that. I am not really interested in popping a toddler on the boob and this seemed like a good time to wean him. He wasn't overly attached to it, more of a "Oh, a boob, well sure, if you're offering, I'll have some" attitude. He has always happily taken a bottle with breastmilk in it, and he was drinking whole milk like a champ.

I am going away with Josh this weekend (Yes, another vacation, seriously. We are free travel whores. He had training in Seattle all week and I am going out there to meet him for a long weekend and we're driving up to Whistler for some snowboarding.) so I decided to gradually cut him down from the four feedings we had been doing for a few months.

First, I shut down the all-night milk bar about a month ago. It closed at bedtime and didn't open again until morning. Then I replaced the mid-morning nursing session with a cup of whole milk. A week later, I started giving him milk after his afternoon nap. Last Friday he started a bottle of whole milk in a bottle before bed and today he got milk when he woke up too.

Of course, he also developed horrible diarrhea today, which SURPRISE, is from the damn dairy intolerance. The diapers were getting looser and looser as we gave him more and more milk. he also has had a runny nose since we introduced the milk and his eczema, while not nearly as bad as it had been in the past, is still somewhat hanging around. So here I am, with no more supply, and a kid who clearly needs to still breastfeed. A call to the pediatrician resulted in a switch to soy milk for a two-week trial. But that is a whole other post.

Anyway.

Because Jack used to wake up early, I would bring him in bed with us in the mornings, where he would nurse and sleep a little longer. So our little mini co-sleeping time also came to an end today. I will really miss that. Every morning, Jack would pop up to a sitting position, let out a loud, "AHHHHHHHH" and then wave at us and laugh. It was a great start to the morning, even when I was butt-tired. How can you not smile when that's your wakeup call?

We can still bring him in bed, I know, and still have that fun time, but it will be different now.

I thought I would be very emotional about the weaning. I imagined a teary farewell nursing session, some sort of demarcation line, I guess. But it wasn't like that. Yesterday morning I nursed him, today I didn't. Pretty anti-climactic.

Jack couldn't care less. He didn't act like he wanted to nurse, didn't complain when I came in to get him from his crib and changed him and got him up instead of coming back to bed, didn't throw up my shirt in search of a nipple. He just sucked down some milk from a sippy cup and that was that.

Now if I could just figure out a way to keep burning that 500 calories a day...