She Must Have Been Tired

So, this was just so cute that I had to share. My daughter was finishing the last of her weaning party cake while I was trying to get us ready for a weekend trip to visit family. I was loading bags in the trunk, wearing a 6 week old in a wrap and talking on the phone with a friend (gotta love multitasking). After awhile it dawned on me that my daughter hadn’t followed me outside to help yet and it had been a good 10 minutes. I decided to go inside to see what kind of mischief she was getting herself into when I discovered this…

Notice the dropped fork

…and no, she has NEVER fallen asleep like this before. I thought this was something kids only did on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Oh drats! Why didn’t I record her sleeping. Oh well. Instead I snapped some pics and then carefully carried her to her bed.

Read Full Post »

The Last Shed of Babyhood – Weaning Party Part II

I experienced a lot of emotions today. I felt more than I expected to feel but then again you never know what to expect when you journey through each passage from babyhood. With each breath they take and every night that passes you assist them in leaving you, in shedding any memory of their constant dependence, until one day they stand free.

Today, we celebrated a big passage for Camden. We celebrated her weaning off of the breast (at almost three years old that makes Camden and I very rare in America). It was her final hold on babyhood and she has officially let it go. We’ve lightly attempted weaning her a couple of times but she was never ready before. With her personality type I figured it may be best to go cold turkey. She doesn’t do well with dragging things out. So, Tuesday morning while we were getting ready to wake up I broached the subject like I have been for about the last 6 months. This time I could sense that she was ready. I asked her if she wanted to make this the last time we nursed and she said yes. I told her that if she wanted to be finished we could celebrate with a “weaning party” the next day.

So we had our last nursing session. I tried to memorize it. Tried to make it special. Tried to lock it deep in my heart so I would never forget. She lingered a lot longer than normal and in the end said a very dramatic good-bye to each one. It suits her, she is a very dramatic girl.

We moved forward a lot smoother than I had expected. She fell asleep in the car while doing an errand and I was able to transfer her to her bed just fine. That night she went to bed easily. She did ask for “nee nee” once but I reminded her that she was done and that we’d have her party in the morning. No tears, no protest. Wow, this might be it.

Next morning she shows up in my bedroom and hops into bed. “Can I have just oooonnneee nee nee?” she asks. “We’re all done with nee nee.” I say. “Today is your weaning party!” She smiles and says “hooray!” She looks at me with puppy dog eyes. “Just a little bit of nee nee?” I smile back, “how about some chocolate milk?” She dashes off the bed, “Ok!” Hmm, this is really working. No tears yet.

We get some breakfast and set off to make her a cake for her party. This is where I enter the point of no return. I have officially crossed over from one of those mainstream people trying to be crunchy (hippie) to someone who will never be accepted as mainstream again. I am most definitely, 100%, without a doubt, one of those people. Today, I made my daughter a cake in the shape of breasts. If it weren’t for the fact that it was my own daughter I would be shaking my own head at myself. Who does that? Well, me I guess. As long as I don’t have to smell and I can shave I guess I will consent that I am a “hippie” as my husband so adamently tries to convince me. He tries as best as he can to stay in his mainstream world and rolls his eyes at mine every now and again. Oh well, he’s coming this way whether he likes it or not. Mwha ha ha.

Yes, she is baking and babywearing at the same time. That’s my girl!

While the cake is baking and I’m cleaning up Mariah Carey is playing in the background. Camden is dancing and asks me to join her. The song “You’ll Always Be My Baby” is playing. As I’m dancing like a fool I realize that the words are amazingly representative of my current emotions and I fight back the urge to tear up as we spin out of control in the playroom. It is hard not to want to wrap up that moment and repeat it over and over.

Anyway, I finish the cake and then it is time to get Camden down for a nap. Hmm. Normally she falls asleep nursing or falls asleep in the car while I’m doing errands and then I transfer her to her bed. I don’t have time to do errands because I have to get the house clean before the party. I attempt to utilitze the bedtime routine for naptime. I read her some stories and sing her a song and tell her it is time to go to sleep. She looks at me incredulously. “I want nee nee.” Crap. Here comes the breakdown. I take a deep breath and put on a happy face. “We’re having your weaning party today!” I remind her happily. “Would you like water or Kix?” She stares at me for a minute. “I don’t want a nap.” Phew. This turned into a battle for naptime and not nursing. I was able to convince her that I would set the timer and she could come out when it went beep, beep (an old method we used to teach her how to go to sleep by herself). It worked. She was out within 15 minutes.

She woke up from her nap happy as can be and was excited for her party. We got ready to go and met a few of our friends at the local Children’s Museum. It was our first time ever going and the kids had a blast.

After the fun at the museum we headed back to our house and ate snacks and had cake. I placed 3 candles on the cake. One candle to represent each year of our nursing relationship (we are just shy of 3 years). One of my friends convinced me that the cake needed nipples. We added some hippie M&M’s (dye free). Wow. The cake reminds me of the Friends episode where Rachel has a bakery make her daughter’s first Birthday cake in the shape of a bunny with her daughter’s picture on it. Except the bakery screws up and puts her daughter’s picture on a cake in the shape of a penis. All I could think of was Joey’s line of “is it bad that I want to eat this?” LOL.

After the cake, we celebrated by painting Camden’s and my friend’s daughters fingernails. A very big girl thing to do that would solidify her passage to being a big girl. She received gifts from our friends of fingernail polish and a fairy skirt for dress up. It was a wonderful day and I am thankful that I have friends that are weird enough to want to celebrate it with us. :)

This evening Camden went to sleep without any struggles. It looks like the weaning will be official. I am both relieved and a little achy to hold onto this last stage of babyhood. It’s hard knowing that your baby is ready to move on. I do my best to know when to step aside and let her find her way. I try to trust her enough to let me know when to nudge her forward and when to grab her hand again. So far she knows herself better than I ever could and to me that means I’m doing something right.

Here is a link to our first attempt at a weaning party.

Read Full Post »

A Weaning Party

A Weaning Party? What the heck is a weaning party? I tried not to turn too many shades of red as the parent of one of the children I watch asked this question when picking up her child. I had forgotten that others might see “our” chart.

Had you told me 3 years ago that I would nurse my two year old I quite probably would have laughed in your face. Ewwww, I would have thought. If they can ask for it they are too old! In fact my husband and I had talked about that a few times before our daughter was born and we both agreed that if they can ask for it then they are too old to be nursing.

Enter in Camden. The child who would prove me wrong and make me question just about everything I had assumed about child raising. I always knew I wanted to breastfeed so that wasn’t a problem. I was breastfed myself for a year and so I was determined to do so for my own daughter. We made it through a lot of initial challenges with engorgement and a foremilk/hindmilk imbalance and the use of nipple shields since my daughter couldn’t get an adequate latch in the beginning. I rocked and rolled through those and didn’t consider switching once because of them.

As my daughter got older I started to hear about “extended nursing” and gave it some thought. I bought a book called Mothering Your Nursing Toddler and it opened my eyes and heart to the idea of nursing her until she was ready to be weaned. It settled some fears about creating a child that was too demanding and reassured me that she would eventually wean and that it wouldn’t have to be a traumatic experience for either of us. I looked at my 11 month old daughter and couldn’t imagine her being ready to wean in a month. She still nursed pretty much every 2-3 hours and didn’t eat much table food. Also, we surpassed that whole asking for it rule when she turned 9 months. She very clearly could sign “nurse”. Hmmm, we thought. Well, when she can actually ask for it in a whole sentence then that is just too old. We entered this new rule into our mental bank.

Nursing during her second year of life was pretty easy and I wasn’t too afraid to admit our nursing relationship. Around 18 months I stopped nursing her in public but I wasn’t embarassed about the fact that I nursed her. Also during this time our daughter became extremely verbal speaking in complete sentences. She is just ahead of her time, we’d think. So we kind of pushed the whole “asking in a whole sentence” rule aside.

Then she turned 2. I started to lose my bravado about nursing. This was definitely uncharted territory for me. I couldn’t quote the W.H.O. (World Health Organization) with as much power since they simply say to nurse until at least the age of 2 and then thereafter as long as mutually desirable. The quote still works of course but now I am past the “at least” part. Now I am one of those people. I didn’t really want to be one of those people. My husband would pop in every now and again with the typical “you’re going to wean her soon, right” “but she’s almost done, right?”. Oh well, he does his best to be supportive.

My daughter is now 2 1/2. She is potty trained, she sleeps by herself in her own room and she now sleeps through the night. She can dress herself, she can feed herself she can even brush her own teeth. But she still nurses. It is the last bit of babyhood that she has. Last month I figured she was ready to let it go. I certainly was ready. My skin crawled sometimes having to sit and nurse her and I didn’t want my attitude to effect our relationship.
I decided I would do something very unspeakable and very, very “hippie” as my husband would say. I would throw her a “weaning party”. A party complete with cupcakes, balloons and a birthday song sung to the words of “No more nee nee’s for you, no more nee nee’s for you. No more nee nee’s for Camden. No more nee nee’s for you.” I then made her a chart that would help her countdown to her party and also help her visually see how many times she had left to nurse. She was down to nursing 2-3 times a day. I decided 10 more times was enough warning and then we would have the party.

She was super duper excited at first and seemed to understand the concept really well. I took these pictures of her in front of her chart on the first day. She loved taking the balloons down and counting how many more times she could have “nee nee” before her party. Then over the next couple days I watched a strange transformation. My daughter stopped sleeping well. She would wake up crying in the middle of the night and when I went in to see her I wasn’t able to comfort her.

She started becoming clingy during the day and started demanding to nurse a lot more than usual. As the day before the party approached I could see that she truly wasn’t ready. Our relationship had detiorated over the last few days and I could see that she was stressed about the impending change but wasn’t able to verbalize it to me (she hadn’t once brought it up that she didn’t want to stop nursing). So I decided to just ask her. I told her that I had noticed that she’d been upset lately and not sleeping well. I asked her if she wanted to keep on having nee nee and have the weaning party another time. She was relieved and said that she wanted to keep on having nee nee – though she still wanted the party – LOL.

In the end I decided to put off weaning her for now. I hadn’t put forth all of this long hard effort of nursing her and creating this relationship just to have it end by me traumatically imposing a stopping time for her. There was no impending reason we had to stop. No medical excuse, no pained nipples from pregnancy – only my lack of patience to allow my daughter to grow into a child at her own pace. I decided to set a limit on the nursing to help me deal with it better and we decided to try and limit nursing sessions to before nap and bedtime.

So maybe my daughter can ask to nurse in a complete sentence, or a completel paragraph for that matter. Maybe she is the oldest nursing child that I know (in real life). Maybe she does choose what “side” she wants first and has actually named my breasts. Maybe I am one of those people. But I’ve decided I don’t want the world to raise my daughter. Heavenly Father has delegated that role to me and I’m confident in his confidence in me. Besides, she won’t be too old to nurse until she can ask for it by writing it in a complete sentence. ;-)

Read Full Post »