Weenie

The Mean Wean

My sister walked in on my the other day and said 'I can't believe a child this size is still breastfeeding.'
I was more than surprised to hear this coming from my sister, who is currently anticipating a drug-free home birth and who has rightfully become the butt of trans-fat jokes for her devotion to health food. It never occurred to me that the size of the baby determines the duration of his nursing. And of course, one has nothing to do with the other.
The truth is, I've been trying for a couple of months now to cut down on feedings. I'm aiming for a one-year wean, but Baby has a different idea in mind. He knows what we're up to and he objects passionately, especially at 3am when snuggling doesn't count unless it involves boob.
Last night, exhausted and suffering from a fever, I gave in. I don't mind breastfeeding. In fact, I love it. I love his sweet 'I only look like I'm asleep' suckling face. I love how he reaches for my mouth while he's fressing. I love making him feel warm and secure and happy. I just wish that I could offer him the same feeling without the hormonal commitment. And that's why I'm bothering to start this weaning process at all.
My sister told me that by nine or ten months, her baby didn't really care much for nursing anymore anyway. This is obviously not the case here. In fact, although he eats several square meals a day (ptu ptu ptu), I am under the impression that he wouldn't mind, at the very least, a milky dessert to each one. He would suck suck suckle all night if I let him still. I don't know what to do. If it wasn't for the fight that my body is putting up against this process then I wouldn't worry about it, and I'd just keep nursing him happily into toddlerhood and beyond.

The Sounds

Oh, the sounds that accompany feeding time!

The sniff sniff of searching for the breast.
The sad, low whine of not getting it fast enough.
The excited cooing when he knows it's coming.
The happy smack and slurp as he latches on.
The tsk tsk tsk of sucking and swallowing.
The followup throaty burrrrp.
The yawn.
The deep breathing.
And he's asleep.

Leaky Braucet

The rotten-milk smell that began when I was in the hospital persisted until about month number 2. That is, it was in my sheets and in my clothes as long as there was milk on them, which was often. I was leaking all over the place. I was going through bra pads like crazy. They would get lost every time I took them out to feed them (Ilan would get upset about finding them all over the house-- or other people's houses if we were sleeping over somewhere) and so I would just pop in some new ones.
The smell went away by about a couple of months. I guess the consistency of the milk had changed significantly enough by then. My breasts were still leaking, though. If I went a little too long between feedings, or as soon as he started sucking on one nipple,the other one would start to gush. This led to some embarrassing incidents. I learned to use my scarf or the nursing apron over my shoulder to cover the spreading stain.
Even today, at nine months, the leaking continues. Sometimes it's like a fountain. All he has to do is get in the right angle and open his mouth.
But at least the smell is gone.

Nine Months

Avi Ohr will be nine months old in a couple of days. The weather has been really hot and he sweats a lot. I feed him water sometimes from a bottle but breastfeeding is probably still the better option. Anyway, he still really loves it. We're in a routine now, though it's definitely not an optimal one. I nurse him in the morning when he wakes up and then I feed him breakfast a little while later. After that, he plays for a while and then signals to me that he's tired and he wants to go to sleep. Signaling, by the way, doesn't mean holding up a handmade sign. It means being irratable and sometimes, if I've missed that sign, he just nods off in the middle of the living room floor. Most of the time, however, naps are when we snuggle up and have another feed. That's how he drifts off to sleep. Sometimes he sleeps for twenty minutes, and sometimes for three hours. Mostly it's somewhere in between. The rest of the day is more or less a variation of the same cycle: eat, play, sleep. I try to put himto bed at around 9:30 but sometimes he gets tired a little earlier and sometimes a little later.
Then comes the night-time. For a few months, he was sleeping through the night. But for a couple of months now we've been on this cycle where he sleeps until midnight or one and then wakes up and wants to be held. The easiest thing for sleepy me to do is just feed him until he falls asleep again and then put him back in bed. Then he wakes up agian around 4. Again, I take him out of bed and feed him, only this time I often fall asleep before I get around to putting him back in the crib. So he is used to waking up in bed with us.

Hi Mom

Somewhere around three or four months, Avi Ohr started a funny habit. He would be snuggled into me and sucking away when all of a sudden he'd crane his head backwards as if to scope out the room. He'd look back at me, smile, and resume suck suck sucking. It was really cute.

Later on, I thought that maybe it was a sign of refusal, like what they tell you to look for before you start feeding solids to your baby. It started at around the same time that some babies start eating, so who knows?

In The Hospital

For the first few days in the hospital (he was there for five days and I stayed with him, fighting tooth and nail for a bed so that I could be nearby), I wasn't at all sure that something was coming out of my boobs when he sucked on them. I went to the lactation classes they offered and talked to a lady teaching a group of lactating experts-to-be, exposing and manipulating parts of me I would have considered very private only a few days earlier-- and in front of ten people at a time, nonetheless. The very nice expert teaching the soon-to-be-experts showed me how I could express colostrum by hand on to a plastic spoon to feed the baby manually. the problem here was twofold: one-- that I didn't then and still today don't like to mess with my breasts. I don't like to squeeze them. Right now they're less sensitive than they used to be, but I only give them a squeeze if I have to. Like the couple of times my duct got clogged -- but that's another story for another time.
The second problem was that I didn't have a spoon. I had been needing one, actually, to eat the leftover yogurts that I'd saved from the breakfast tray. There were none on the ward and, indeed, none in the whole hospital. Ilana eventually sent one for me with Yaaron. I found it on the chair by my bed when I woke up one morning.
Anyway, on day ... was it three or four? I know it happened in my new room but I moved in to my new room on a Friday... well, it must have been Shabbat morning, which was the fourth morning after the baby was born. I woke up to the smell of something rotting and the feeling of something heavy sitting on my chest. "Where is that smell coming from?" I thought. "And what is sitting on my chest?" Turns out it was my breasts. This is what they call the milk 'coming in.' And come down it did. I had rivers running down the front of my shirt. I had no nursing pads. I had no spare shirts left. I think I ended up walking around the ward like that for a while. Ilana sent me some nursing pads. Ilan brought me some appropriate bras. Ima brought nursing bras for me when she got here from Toronto a few days later. That's also another story for another time. I should remember this one and tell it. My boobs were rock-hard. I felt like a porn star, and offended a couple of people by telling them so. I later re-evaluated this comparison and said that I looked like a department store dummy. Except that a store dummy doesn't have a fountain of milk coming out of each nipple.