Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Weaning is such sweet sorrow

Sophie has been fed only breastmilk for the first 5 months of her life. Our general approach to introducing solids and weaning has been a soft and gentle tread.

This perhaps has something to do with our current child care where we (deliberately) arrange for Sophie to have just her mum and dad around every weekend. [Note to Self: A world without any form of paid childcare is a very scary place, and I try never to take my excellent ayis for granted!!]

At 6:30am on weekend mornings when you have an (extremely) active toddler who wants to play the time honoured game of "Let's jump and down on my parent's bed till they get out of it", the best way to get her to lie quietly and snuggle is to offer her "nai-nai".The other thing we have started doing is to set some rules (e.g no nai-nai when we are out of the house) but quite often this rule is more observed in its breach.

La Leche advocates breastfeeding for at least 6 months, but afterwards to continue for as long as both baby and mommy feel comfortable.

I think that this Christmas in France should be one of the last times where she has reasonably easy access to my boob and the 2008 resolution is that I have to be more firm about saying "nai-nai finished - no more!!".

But it will be just so damn hard in those weekend mornings, and a part of me will always miss having her little face pressed against me with that look of pure and utter contentment and security.

2 comments:

The Missus Complains said...

With baby #2 I am having trouble nursing again so I am jealous of mom who can nurse their babies. I remember having such a hard time with Veronica. With Lorenzo it is almost the same thing. He had jaundice and so we had to feed him my pumped milk from a bottle since he was too weak and tired to nurse. Now that the jaundice has passed he is still not nursing well. Apparently he does not have enough fat in his cheeks to pull the milk into his mouth. Ugh!

rene said...

Lucas started to reject my boob from about 10.5months, so some days I miss the feeling of him nursing from me. I am really not fond of the pump and bottles! what milk do you supplement her with? Homo, goat's or formula?