One Year of Breastfeeding/Weaning

Woweeeee. I made it a year of breastfeeding. So crazy. If you made it one day, one week, one month, one year, you know how much work it can be! That ish is a full time job with a lot of emotions. 😛 Before I get into how I weaned and what it was like for me, I want to share a little on my journey with breastfeeding and how it was for us!

If you didn’t know, Summer was born a little over five weeks early and spent just shy of a week in the NICU. She was on bottles from day one, and I pumped as much as I could while I was in the hospital (If you don’t know my whole birth story and why I was in the hospital, you can read about that here). I had planned to breastfeed all along but I just had the view of we will see what happens which ended up being good considering both of our circumstances. After we left the hospital, I had hopes of trying to breastfeed but I was just going to take it a day at a time. For the first couple weeks, we had to only give her bottles because we had to measure how much milk she was eating and to fortify it to insure she was getting enough nutrition and would be putting weight onto her little four pound body.

After we got the go-ahead from our pediatrician to transition her, I was a little hesitant about how it would go, so I did what any new mom does, and I turned to Google. Ya’ll that Google bish knows errrthang. 😛 I found this article, and loved the advice it gave and also felt motivated since she managed to do it with twins! I bought a nipple shield and got started right away. You can read the article yourself but basically she suggests using the nipple shield in the beginning to get them used to breastfeeding and then eventually doing less and less time with the shield and trying to get them on your bare nipple. It took a little while (maybe a month?) but it worked! I was hesitant to let the nipple shield go because you guys know what comes next? Stinging nipples. Yay. I remember texting my friend all the time asking how freaking long it would take these suckers to toughen up. I wish I could tell you it was fast but ya’ll, while it did get much better after a month or so, I remember 7-8 months in whining to Ben about how the heck could my nipples STILL be stinging sometimes after all this time. I’m telling you. Breastfeeding is no joke. Add to that that one time I pumped almost 3 ounces of straight blood because of a cracked nipple or all the clogged ducts that were probably borderline mastitis, and it’s a wonder I even typed the first line of this post.

Anyways. Jesus thank you for making our bodies so cool that we can feed our babies even if it’s really freaking hard sometimes. 😛

I have had some questions along the way about how many times a day and when I was feeding Summer, and by the time we sleep trained her at about 5.5 months, I was doing about 6 times a day. We did that pretty consistently for several months, and then maybe about 9ish months, we went down to five. Then gradually four. Right before I weaned her, I was feeding her three times a day but the middle of the day one, she was never super interested in.

A Friday morning three weeks ago (from when I actually wrote this back in May shortly after she turned one), Summer woke up, and immediately asked to get down to play. She NEVER does that. I usually can’t breastfeed her fast enough! So I was like hmmm, I wonder if maybe today we can make the transition. I had tried a few times in the past to give her a bottle but she wouldn’t take it from me, only from other people. And I obviously had to get her to take one from me if I wanted to wean her. She ended up just skipping that morning milk feeding and had breakfast. I decided I would try to do a bottle with breast milk that night to see if she would take it. She ended up taking it no problem! Instead of going cold turkey, I wanted to nurse her a few more times so that it gave my body time to transition without my having to pump etc. I had this vision of my boobs getting so full and engorged and painful and my having to pump and hope I wasn’t just telling my body to produce more milk.

So the weekend went like this:

Thursday night: Breastfeeding

Friday Morning: Skipped and straight to breakfast

Friday night: Bottle with breastmilk

Saturday morning: Breastfeeding

Saturday night: Bottle with breastmilk

Sunday morning: Bottle with whole milk

Sunday night: Breastfeeding

And since then, I haven’t breastfeed her! My boobs never got super full like I thought they might but I will say I was shocked how long they still felt like they had a decent amount of milk in them. Like it made me think next baby, I could go away on a trip and not even pump and come back and get right back to breastfeeding. 😛 Last week, I did get what sort of felt like a clogged duct but I wasn’t super full or anything. I just massaged it and took a hot shower and made sure to pay close attention that it wasn’t getting bad, and it went away after a couple of days. I’m guessing maybe it was just things drying up in there or something! I think maybe it’s pretty dried up in there now but I’m not 100% sure, and it’s been three weeks since weaned her off.

Just want to quickly touch on the emotional side of weaning her too. I know some people LOVE breastfeeding and some people HATE it. I didn’t have a crazy attachment to it but I also didn’t not like it. I just felt so thankful that I was able to do it and in awe of how God created our bodies to give life to these tiny babies even after we grow them inside of us. When I decided to stop, I just felt ready. I knew she was loved and fed and that’s all that matter. I will say the first two weeks after I stopped, I was questioning myself a lot. Like wondering if I had made the right choice etc. But honestly I the thought of going back wasn’t truly appealing, and I think those thoughts were based more on what I thought other people might think about my stopping, not what I truly felt was right for both of us. And then I just prayed for those feelings to go away and that I wouldn’t dwell on them, and I haven’t looked back since!

And let me tell you, gosh was it nice to have my baby boobies back. 😛

Hope this helped any of you wondering how the whole process might go for you, and if you have any questions, let me know!

xx,

Christine