A Brief Treatise on Weaning

So Julie asked me to post on how weaning was going and since I am procrastinating memorizing my lines or scoring my script for Anton in Showbusiness, I'm happy to oblige.
We started weaning two weeks ago. I stopped nursing her with her afternoon snack, which is at 4:30 and is yogurt. I also tried to give her cow's milk, but she wasn't too interested. The first day, she still seemed hungry, so I nursed her early for dinner. I felt kind of uncomfortably full and that good old ability to squirt milk across the room came back, but it felt doable. The next day I gave her more yogurt and that seemed to fill her up just fine. She still didn't show much interest in the cow's milk.

About a week later, I discovered I'd been giving her too many dairy products and so I cut out the cow's milk for the time being. My original plan was to cut out a feeding every week, but after that first week I felt so uncomfortably full much of the time, I wimped out and decided to wait too weeks. So this Monday, two days ago, we cut out nursing with breakfast. Stella didn't even notice and frankly, neither did I. I do notice cumulatively over the course of the day that I feel a little engorged, but nothing like the early days when your milk comes in.

I am getting a little emotional about what's ahead, though. The thought that if all goes according to plan, she'll be weaned in 4 weeks makes me a little sad. But babies grow up, and she's getting to be a toddler now, it's okay that she doesn't need that part of me anymore, she still needs me for a lot of other stuff. I'm also nervous about next week's meal dropping because I'm going to be going a LONG time between feedings no matter what feeding I choose. If I choose to cut out lunch, she'll be going about 13 hours, if I cut out dinner first, she'll be going about 10 or 11. I'll probably start with cutting out dinner. I have no clue how my body's going to do when I'm just feeding her at 11:00pm and 6:30am, the last feedings I'm going to cut out and the ones I'm most nervous about. I mean, that 11:00pm feeding is going to be really hard to get her to give up. It's the one that kept us from attending all of SXSW a couple of weeks ago. And those of you with babies know that you'll do anything to get your baby to sleep. I'm hoping perhaps some cuddling and a cup of milk will replace that feeding.

T. Barry Brazelton suggests waking your child up before you go to bed for some cuddling and perhaps a feeding to keep them from waking you up in the middle of the night, so we may be doing some variation on our current routine for a while. I'm NOT going back to middle of the night wake-ups!