All Done Mommy Milk

Tags

breastfeeding, nursing, toddler, weaning

Owl is now officially weaned, and I’m not sure he likes it.

We’d been slowly cutting down on the nursing for a while. When he was around 18 months old we stopped nursing on demand. He could nurse in the morning and in the evening and before naps if I was home, but he couldn’t just yank my shirt down.

By the time he was two, nap time nurse sessions had been cut even if I was home.

Then, a couple of months ago, he stopped asking for milk before bed. PH had put him to bed a couple of times in a row because I was out training dogs, and Owl didn’t ask and I didn’t suggest it, and that was pretty much that.

The morning nursing sessions continued.

Part of it was simply that we were unmotivated to try and wean him first thing in the morning. We were tired and if latching him on would get us another fifteen minutes of rest, we would take it.

But I wasn’t enjoying it any more. My breasts were producing milk but were never full, and Owl’s nursing just felt annoying.

But he wanted it, every morning, and I was reluctant to cut that last string.

Then my mother came for a visit, and that fixed it.

Mum would go to Owl when he woke up in the morning and he would spend an hour or more happily on her lap reading stories or watching videos on her tablet. In fact, if I tried to come into the room he’d shoo me away. “No, that MY Nana!”

And so a week went by wherein he didn’t nurse in the morning. When Mum left, PH took over distracting him in the mornings, so he didn’t go back to his old ways.

And that was that – he was weaned.

But I’m not sure he’s happy about it. He has asked for Mommy Milk a number of times, and even cried for it when he was feeling sick.

He will also just whine for Mommy, even when I am holding him.

“I’m right here, Owl, what do you want?”

“Me want YOU, Mommy.”

“But I’m RIGHT HERE! You have me!”

It’s heart breaking and frustrating. In fact, it’s a lot like when he was a colicky newborn. I’m giving you what you want – why aren’t you happy?

He also started chewing his nails a couple months ago – right around the time he gave up the nighttime weaning. He bites them right down to stubble, and no matter how much Daycare Lady hounds him about germs or how many times PH and I remind him that he’s giving himself “owies” by doing it, the fingers go back in his mouth.

Lately, he has started sucking on his fingers as well.

I don’t really know what to do about this. When I see it, I feel guilty for taking away his comfort, but after all, I nursed him for 28 months… that’s more than most kids get!

But yesterday, he pulled at my shirt and said “Me baby now,” he said cuddling up. “Me drink Mommy Milk.”

“Mommy Milk’s all gone, Owl,” I reminded him.

“Me pretend have Mommy Milk” he insisted and nipped at the shirt for a moment. Then he patted my breast and said, “Me finished the Mommy Milk. Me eated ALL the Mommy Milk.”

“That’s right, it’s all done,” I told him.

And I hope he doesn’t suck his skin right off his fingers as a replacement activity.

Little Owl: 16 Month Omnibus Edition

Tags

16 months, babies, development, language development, milestones, nursing

Two years ago I was newly pregnant, very freaked out but also hoping that I was on the verge of something awesome.

Boy, was I.

Today, Owl is 16 months old.

I’ve never been big on toddlers. Little babies are good because they’re so simple to interact with. Hugs and tickles = good. The end. Kids are fun, too, because you can play imaginative games and read stories with them and listen to their peculiar world views.

But toddlers are just sort of… in between. Especially the 1-2 year old set. They LOOK like little people. They walk like little people. They have strong opinions like little people. But really… they’re babies. They can’t have a conversation with you, they don’t understand English all that well, and they certainly have no capacity for reason.

And they always seem to have baked beans on their face.

So I always saw the toddler stage as something I would just suffer through.

But actually? It’s been SO MUCH FUN.

Watching Owl’s language capacity expanding day by day is frigging awesome. Before you have kids, you wonder how someone can get so excited just because their child learned where his own nose is. But when you realize that you MADE something that can identify the location of its own nose, you can’t help but get really excited.

Especially when you remember the days when this self same person couldn’t even hold up his own head.

It’s hard to keep track of language milestones when you’re doing baby sign language, because it isn’t mainstream enough to provide a large enough statistical pool. 

That being said, I think that Owl is about average for his age. When it comes to actual spoken words, he says “mama”, “dada”, “da” (which means dog, cat, duck, and several other things), “nana” (meaning my mother or a banana), “brr” (meaning book or bear or bird or boat), “ho” (horse), “ball”, “down”, “uh” (up), a strangled “ggraaghhh” which is his attempt at “cracker”, “uh-oh”, and today he developed “awa” (whale or water).

But when you add in his signs, his vocabulary is much larger. It is thanks to the signs that we know the difference between dog, cat, and duck, or between bird, book, bear, and boat. The vast majority of his words are beyond his sad little attempts at pronunciation. We find it hard to keep up with him, but we estimate his total vocabulary to be around 40-50 words.

Sounds impressive, but really, since he only has 8 or 9 spoken words, I think he’s bang on average for his age.

It’s still fun to watch. He is hungry for words and will turn through a book obsessively, identifying nouns, and studying us closely when we show him a new sign.

Do you mind? My book and I are having a private moment.

In fact, he largely ignores all other toys, choosing instead to identify things in his books again and again and AGAIN.

His walking is pretty good now, and he’s almost running. He does a funny little  waddle run, which is usually ended by a tumble and a little voice going “uh-oh…”

This seems totally safe to run on!

He’s just full of giggles and silliness (my in-laws complimented us on his “advanced” sense of humor. Not sure what that means considering that he still thinks that being dangled upside down is the height of comedy, closely followed by me pretending to be scared of him).

Daycare Lady still praises his easy going and cheerful nature, which should be hilarious to anyone who remembers his newborn days. 

I’m not sure I’d really call Owl easy going. He’s… INTENSE. When he’s happy, he’s very, very happy. When he’s upset, he’s VERY LOUD ABOUT IT. Thankfully he is confidant and generally disposed to be happy most of the time.

The only thing that he really has tantrums about is nursing.

He is still a savage nurser, insisting on milk constantly when I’m around, although he happily goes all day without it at daycare. If milk isn’t delivered the second he starts signing ‘MILK, PLEASE, PLEASE, MILK, MILK, PLEASE?” he starts to freak out – getting clingy and whiny and then I need to talk him into a calm state before I will actually let him nurse.

If I’m holding him and he wants to nurse but I need to put him down so I can, say, take off my coat to expose my boobas, he pulls his legs up to his belly and clings to me like some kind of simian.

He’s a little crazy about the boobas. 

I know that if I cut out all nighttime nursing he’d probably be sleeping through the night – we cut down to just one nursing at 3-4 AM and he started sleeping from bed time (the earliest we seem able to get him down is 8:30 pm, which seems late, but he JUST WON’T GO DOWN earlier) until that early morning nurse.

The last few days that seems to have gone to hell, but I think he’s teething again.

I should probably work on getting him off of that 3 AM nursing session, and then I’d have a baby who sleeps through the night, probably, most nights. Some nights any way.

But it’s so hard to stay conscious long enough to put him back down any other way. This is my failing, not his.

The nursing demands cause so many problems that I think I would consider weaning if it weren’t for two things:

1) Clearly he’s not ready to wean, and I can’t imagine what forcing him away from the booba would be like. VERY LOUD, no doubt.

2) He’s still tiny. He’s 9.5 kg, according to the scale at daycare, and that’s in light clothing, including his cloth diaper. Now, he hasn’t dropped his percentiles much (for a while there he slipped down to, like, the 9th percentile, but as you folks predicted, he has regained that lost weight.) but still – he’s wee.

I’m okay with his teenyness, but right now the last thing PH and I want to do is deprive him of any possible extra calories because clearly he needs them. His enthusiasm for food rivals the average Labrador Retriever.

Last month Daycare Lady handed him a piece of cheese, and he was so excited that he fell right out of his chair and knocked his face on the side of the table. He then screamed until he ran out of air and contiued to scream silently for a while BUT NEVER ONCE RELINQUISHED HIS HOLD ON THE CHEESE.  He then proceeded to continue to cry for the next 5 or 10 minutes – a long time, for him – WHILE DEVOURING THE CHEESE.

No, I don't beat my baby. There was just an incident with some cheese.

Today I fed Owl several mandarin oranges, some waffle, some crackers, and then two bowls of spaghetti with meat sauce and cheese. Then we want to a friend’s house where he spent the next THREE HOURS eating grapes, strawberries, nuts, pretzels, carrots, brocolli, and more NON-STOP.

This is NORMAL for him, and still you can see the knobs on his spine when he bends over.

Wee Owl

In fact, since we’re afraid that giving him cow’s milk will bring back the diarrhea, and since I can never seem to pump more than two or three ounces in a day, we’re seriously talking about buying him some formula for daycare, because I have forbidden juice, and water just doesn’t have enough calories.

We have to keep up his calories, because clearly he’s burning them somewhere.

Either that or he has a tapeworm.

I wish I had this problem.

GO the F*** To Sleep. Srsly. I Really Mean It This Time. I DO!

Tags

babies, breastfeeding, naps, night weaning, nursing, sleep, sleep training

I baby sat my friend Pug Mama‘s toddler for the day a couple of weeks ago, and my account of his nap time has become PH’s new favourite story.

It goes like this:

Nap time had arrived, so I went up to the tot (who is around 20 months old) and said, “Are you ready for night-nights?”

[NotMaryP is out there reading this and mentally bashing me over the head with a rolled up newspaper for asking a baby such a question]

The baby, who had been roaring around with his toys and books for hours, cavalierly responded with “No!”

Realizing my mistake, I remedied it as best I could with a cheerful “Well, you’re going night-night anyway!”

“OH,” he said, his voice resonating a deep disgust.

So I picked him up and carried him to his crib.

“And then what happened?” PH will ask, even though he knows full well what happened. But he likes to hear it. Again and again.

The kid rolled onto his belly and went to sleep. 

“He just… went to sleep?” PH will repeat, his eyes wide with wonder. “Just like that?”

“He was almost asleep before I had even finished zipping him into his sleep-bag,” I tell him. PH then stares off into space dreamily, picturing this mysterious and magical moment, and savouring it.

“Wow.”

Last Sunday, I left Babby home with his Daddy and Pug Mama and I went for a leisurely dinner and a movie. I told her for the umpteenth time how impressed I was with her baby’s ability to switch to sleep mode so instantly and congratulated her on good fortune.

“Oh, don’t worry, he was JUST as bad as Babby when he was that age,” she said with conviction. “Maybe even worse. He was colicky. He screamed. Up constantly, all night long, nursing to sleep every time… He always ended up on the boob in my bed halfway through the night.”

“So what changed?” Had she done cry-it-out? It didn’t seem like her style, somehow.

“No, but when he was 11 months old, I knew I had to go back to work, and I knew I couldn’t keep waking up constantly all night long. So I took a couple of weeks and taught him to fall asleep on his own.”

She then described a process which was similar to the one in The No-Cry Sleep Solution – the one that I have started “phase one” of umpteen times, but have never progressed from.

The only difference was that, in the interest of time and sleep, she basically skipped right to step three (soothing the baby without the breast and putting him down to fall asleep in the crib.)

Her process was as follows:

“You soothe and rock and sing to him for a little while, then you lay him down in the crib and give him a minute there. He won’t sleep. He’ll cry. Pick him back up, soothe him, and put him back down and give him a minute. You’ll have to do this again, and again, and again. The first night i had to do it over 20 times before he fell asleep. I had to do it 20 times again the next time he woke up, and again the NEXT time he woke up. You DON’T GIVE IN.”

That made sense. Haven’t I told and told puppy raisers that rewarding bad behaviour ONCE guarantees that it’ll pop up again ten more times, even if they punish it all those other ten times?

“Anyway, after a few times I only had to do it 15 times before he slept, and then 10 times, and then five times. A week later he was only waking up once or twice in the night, and after two weeks, he was sleeping through most nights. And now he sleeps from 7 to 7. It was the best thing I ever did. Once he learned that he could fall asleep on his own, he was so much happier.”

The key thing, she kept reminding me, was determination. She was motivated by her return to work to stick to her guns.

Determination has always been our problem with Babby’s bad sleep habits [BAD dog trainer, BAD!]. Between you and me and the rest of the internet, part of me has always cherished those night-time nursings. I like snuggling with my baby in the wee sma’s of the morning. As an insomniac, I appreciate the flood of sleepy-hormones that comes with it.

As for PH, he just liked having an easy way to soothe his baby, because PH has never been able to handle the crying well. He even hates that Mythbusters episode where they take candy from babies, because he can’t stand to see the babies cry. That’s the main reason why our attempt to wean Babby off of night nursing lasted all of fifteen minutes.

However, my night time/early morning snuggles with Babby aren’t the sweet cuddly times that they used to be. Since he learned to crawl, I spend much of my time between 3 am and 6:30 am being kicked, climbed over, pinched, and sat-on. There’s a rail on the bed so Babby can’t fall off, but he uses it to pull himself to standing, and then he tries to walk on me while holding onto the rail for support.

Sleep? What is "Sleep"?

He tweaks my nipples. I have actual BRUISES on my boobas from his playful morning exuberance.

It’s not so cute.

All in all, Babby’s sleep is worse than ever. He has gone to sleep without booba increasingly often – largely out of necessity– but it’s always a big screamfest and we never forward to a repetition. 

When I got home late from that dinner and a movie out, Babby had woken up three times, and PH had been unable to get him back to sleep a third time. Babby had therefore been awake and fussing for over an hour and a half.

Obviously, it would have been a douche-nozzle thing to do if I had whisked in there and popped Babby on the breast. Might as well tell him “If you scream for an hour and a half, Mommy will finally reappear and give you what you want” and thus doom PH to hours of screaming every time I go out at night.

So we rocked and sang, rocked and sang until THREE IN THE MORNING when he finally passed out. Then Babby finally fell asleep for a good three and a half hours before waking up for the day.

We haven’t really been able to catch up on our sleep since. His squirminess is worse than ever. PH was jolted awake the other night by the sheer volume of my frustration as I took an upright Babby and flipped him prone for the bazillionth time and tried to nurse him to sleep.

Finally, at 5 am, PH took Babby from me (since Babby clearly had no interest in nursing and ergo, in sleeping) and carried him into the nursery. He returned exhausted but triumphant an hour later.

Babby had fallen asleep IN HIS CRIB while PH sang who knows how many rounds of Old MacDonald.

That same day, I got a job offer.

The job is working as a tech in a clinic down the road. The vet is into holistic and homeopathic stuff, so I’m a little leery, but he seemed nice and competant and I hope that I will like it there.

My anxiety is in full over-drive. The vet who hired me has been very vague about how many hours I am to work, and hasn’t given me any other job info. Then again, I’ve been just as vague back. He wants to know when I can start and I don’t know. I called the Daycare lady and apparently she’s frigging overseas until mid August, so I can’t even talk to her about getting Babby into her daycare until then. I have no idea how quickly she can take him, and no way of finding out for two more weeks.

This is a problem.

One thing is for sure – I can’t start work for at least two more weeks.

That gives me two weeks to get Babby falling asleep in his crib.

And maybe some day I’ll tell him that it’s time for nap-naps, and he’ll just say “Oh,” and GO THE F*** TO SLEEP.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW0A6L9kx4c&feature=related]

Day 1 Update