How to Wean a Toddler

Have a blocked milk duct.  Cry.  Give the baby a bottle every day.  Baby eventually eats less and less from bottle. Taper off due to laziness.  Offer bottle again. Baby refuses and throws bottle across the room

Have a milk blister.  Cry. Get baby, now one year old, a straw cup.  Put milk in it.  Baby refuses and throws cup across the room.  Repeat with soy milk, goat milk, and all of these with sugar, honey, or malt syrup (just a little).  Baby refuses and throws cup across room. Everybody cries.

Have a milk blister that won't go away.  Put a bandaid with antibiotic on it every day.  Cry some more.  Offer the baby a straw cup with water.  Baby drinks quite a lot of water, but nurses just as much.

Continue to have the @#$%ing milk blister.  Decide to cut baby's nursing down slowly, starting with only nursing four times a day (wakeup, nap, after lunch, bedtime.). Do this for three days.

Baby catches a vile cold and has a fever of 102 F for three and a half days and refuses to eat food.  Nurse the baby allllll daaaaayyyy because she is sick and sad.

Just as she gets better, catch the vile cold yourself and feel extremely ill and headachy.  Lose all will to live/wean, plus all tolerance of screaming.  Nurse the baby seven times a day.

Cry.

Role Reversal

Otherwise Excellent Doctor to me: 'Maybe an ultrasound would be helpful.'

Me: 'Okay, but how would that information change anything we're going to DO?'

OED: '..... good point.'

Running cost of breastfeeding troubles, food not included:
ENT: $150, $40 = $190
Medical visits: $15 x6 = $90
Prescriptions: $15, $15, $50, $15 = $95
Asst. related supplies: $100

$475

Plus food.
May or may not be less expensive than formula but is NOT free. 

(It also transpires that never ending boob problems- in this case, a milk blister that will NOT go away no really no matter what, leading to blocked ducts and/or weekly nipple unblocking with sharp pointy needle, by me- can be helped by applying steroids and antibiotics [triamcinolone and mupirocin], with bandaid, four times a day.  I recommend Curad Truly Ouchless band-aids; several other varieties hurt immensely, left me with peculiar rashes, or were otherwise unsatisfactory. They are latex free; naturally, I am allergic to latex.  I leave this information for the Google Machine and the next poor soul experiencing this problem.)

100% Correct

Earlier this month, I was at LLL.  Some poor woman was being pressured by her relatives to wean her otherwise healthy one year old.  So, naturally, I told her my response to hostile relatives: "When one of us is tired of it."

"Oh, Jenny," the LLL leader (a gentle silver haired woman my mother's age) said, "you're just so feisty!  You don't care what anyone else thinks!"

Later she came up and said she hoped she hadn't offended me by calling me feisty.

"Of course not," I said.

 But what I was really thinking was how remarkably perceptive she is!  I AM a mouthy broad!  And I do NOT care!  She couldn't have summed me up more accurately if she'd tried for a week.

So Maaaaaaaagical

Once, I was at LLL and we were talking about how we felt about nursing.  Predictably, there was one Amber Necklace Nut who affirmed that it mde her feel so wonderful!  Euphoric, even!  So powerfully life-giving BLAH BLAH BLAH.

"I feel trapped," I said.  "I can't leave the baby for more than 20 minutes*, there's someone pawing at me all the hours of the day, and it drives me crazy."

(I was reminded of this as the baby whacked me with all her might, and then grabbed my tank top strap and snapped it repeatedly, while nursing.)

"Ooookay.... but most people really find it rewarding!" the leader said (doubtless trying to reassure all the new moms. Plus, probably deluded.)

Readers, I feel about breastfeeding like I feel about science.  We do it because we find some aspects of it rewarding, but many parts are really annoying. These can both be true at the same time.

What's your least favorite part of baby-feeding (or, if you have no baby to feed, other people's annoying children)?


*this was when she was too small for people food and hadn't yet figured out bottles. 

Daily Write It Out: Nursing

It's surprisingly hard to produce readable English on a tablet.  But, you know, I need to write to retain my sanity.  So forgive us our linguistic trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I feel most amazingly trapped.  In large part by breastfeeding, which prevents me from, say, gardening, or going to the gym, or knitting, or going to knitting, or... you get the idea.  I know that this too shall pass, but if people would stop telling me I'll miss it, I'd be grateful.

In related news, Sweetpea has consented to take a bottle three! whole! times!  In retrospect, however, right after she rolled over the first time (and was consequently in a righteous fury) was not the best time for today's bottle.  So far, so goaty. (Not a typo; this.  Due to my cow dairy allergy and her eczema I was hesitant to give her cow or soy yet.)

Because I'm a terrible mother, I also gave her a little banana today at 4.5 months.  She loved it, and I was getting tired of the piteous crying every time she smelled food.

This may be a product of my trapped depressed feeling like nobody listens to me and my mommying work has no value to me.... but I kind of want to become a lactation consultant.  It would take me at least eight years, I estimate, since this would be a seriously part time endeavor.  It's somewhat problematic that the main route now is as a LLL leader, since I'm cruelly weaning my baby (slowly) with a complete disregard for how I should be a miserable milk machine for her sake until next December.  How dare I prioritize my own needs?  Nonetheless.  This is born in part from the feeling that there should be more LCs in the world who say 'It's okay to wean your baby.  It's okay to hate nursing or even just dislike it. It's okay to NOT nurse your toddler on demand if you don't want.  Nursing does not have to be a magical bonding experience. All that HAS to happen is your baby HAS to be fed something.  Breastmilk probably has minimal real benefits.  If you want to breastfeed I will do my best to help, support, and educate you, but if you choose not to, or to add in formula, I will also help, support, and educate you.  And I will try to help you feel good and not guilty about your choices because breast is not always best.' And it is also born of the feeling that I have never met a LC - except my doctor in Cold State- who actually said those words to me.  (In fact she said something like, a chronic infection with severe pain is a medically indicated and completely reasonable reason to wean your child, and I will help you as best I can until you are ready to wean him.  So good for her.)