My Weaning Journey
In my experience, weaning is one of the hardest parts of nursing!
I have weaned two babies now using two completely different methods and I finally feel comfortable sharing how I did it. With my oldest, Liam, I had no option but to stop cold turkey. Liam passed away when he was 10.5 months old. It was very sudden and he was still nursing throughout the day when he died. I have no idea how cold turkey weaning affects the child. But I can attest that it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. It took about two weeks until I finally dried up. At the time I only tried frozen cabbage leaves and other ice packs, neither did much good for the pain. If you decide to use this method my best advice is to wrap them up as tight as you can handle and keep your hands off of them. Each time I caved and released “a little pressure” my body thought it needed to produce more milk.
I decided to start weaning Carson at the end of October, he was 18 months old and we just found out I was pregnant again. I had been DREADING the process because Carson has always been a very boob obsessed baby. He never took a bottle nor a pacifier, the boobies were his one and only source of comfort. I started applying peppermint oil in the hopes of drying up to speed up the weaning process. Unfortunately I was still nursing him for naps and bedtime so the oil wasn’t effective.
I started by taking away his daytime feedings except the two before his naps. That step was hard for about a week and I would always offer snacks when he wanted milkies. After about two weeks I started to cut his naptime feedings. I did this by driving him around in the car or walking around / watching a movie until he finally fell asleep from exhaustion. It took a bit of time but by the beginning of December he was able to put himself to sleep for nap without milkies.
Our weaning journey seemed to plateau after that. Carson was going through a phase where he was struggling to sleep through the night and transitioning to one nap a day. I decided to not push him any farther until I felt he was ready. Nursing also started to become extremely painful for me. Naturally I was producing much less because the demand was so low. This caused Carson to become more forceful with his latch, I’m assuming he thought if he sucked harder more would come. Which inevitably led to him using his teeth… let me just throw it out there being bitten while nursing while also pregnancy was EXTREMELY painful.
In the beginning of January I noticed that I was no longer producing any milk. It had been a solid month of only nursing once a day, so I wasn’t too surprised. Carson still needed the comfort of a pacifier to help him sleep at night but he was finally sleeping through the night so no more midnight feedings. By this point nursing had become excruciatingly painful, for weeks I kept saying no more at night but always caved out of exhaustion. The day that Carson turned 21 months I decided I was done and we watched a movie until he fell asleep in bed. It only took a few nights before he caught on and stopped asking for milkies. We started a bad habit of driving him around to fall asleep. It took two months to end that habit.
To summarize: it took a solid three months to fully wean Carson, and that’s okay. Weaning, like everything else in life, is NOT a race! We chose to wean in a way that wouldn’t traumatize Carson. Taking it slow and cutting one feeding at a time was what worked best for him. When we started I truly thought it would only take a few weeks. But I quickly realized it wasn’t my choice, it was Carson’s. Weaning cold turkey is another option that I recommend. It is extremely painful but much quicker. I am contemplating using the cold turkey method combined with bandaids on my nipples for Mila, when she is ready.
