Andrew and I are done nursing. He is not so happy about it at times, and it is hard for me too. He still asks every morning but a habit of over 2 and a half years is difficult to let go of. Andy and I both feel that it is the right time. I was growing resentful and I’d tried and tried to make it work happily for both of us and it just wasn’t.
Overall it was an amazing 32 months of nursing my first baby. He is so much more of a Big Boy now that we’ve stopped though. Even if he still asks when he is tired, I know that it is only for a short while longer. It’s like he’s just grown up all of a sudden. I have even had to take down a lot of the baby pictures we have of him around. We didn’t have any pics of him hung up that were over a year old and it seems wrong since he will be 3 in 4 short months.
I am actually now enjoying nursing Paul T more and able to relax about it better. Andrew is even more accepting of it, he says “Paul not go sleep, he’s just eating.” Andrew doesn’t like it when I put Paul T to sleep because that usually means we have to be a bit quieter. And i think he’s liking to play with his baby brother quite a bit more now. They played chase today! Andrew was crawling around trying to get Paul to follow. It even worked for a while! And no one can make Paul laugh harder and deeper than Andrew.
Andrew is now also pretending to be a baby a bit more often, though it is already subsiding. We let him and play along with him a bit. We remind him it is pretend and then go through some of the things he gets to do now that he isn’t a baby, like eat ice cream! I have also let him pretend to nurse a couple of times, but that was really only the first couple of days.
It has been a week today since our last time. I had tried to go back up to full time with him for a while to see if it helped out when we stopped and I think it made it easier. He got it whenever he wanted for a few weeks then we went back to once a day for a couple of weeks, then stopped. I didn’t fully plan all of that, just followed my heart and what I felt I needed to do at the time. It’s still hard.
I tell him it is hard for me too. I have to resist the urge to give it to him when he asks because like him it is a habit for me. But it was so uncomfortable at the end and just didn’t seem like what he really needed anymore.
I know I would have weaned him at 2 years old had I not had Paul. Andrew lost out on 6 months worth of milk while I was pregnant and to be fair to him, to be sure he got his full two years, I had planned to nurse him until Paul was 6 months old. Well Paul is 8 months old now so we went a bit over, but the time is just right.
And it is amazing how much food that child eats now! He always ate a lot before but now it seems like so much more. I love watching him eat and tell him so all the time. In fact our relationship has grown in a lot of ways.
I also give him a special yogurt drink and vitamin every morning. It helps him. And of course we still do lots of cuddles and I hope that he never weans from that!
This has been a very sad happy but happy overall. I can say my Big Boy had the best start in life!