Weaning

Just a side note before I talk about weaning, Kaelyn thumbs everything. She doesn't bang on things with a flat hand, she thumbs EVERYTHING. Here is an example. Nice noisy chair to slap, but no, she thumbs it. It's cute and unique!

Kaelyn will be 10 months old on Wednesday. She shows no evidence of weaning herself so I thought maybe I would try a few things to help her get the idea. When she was 4 1/2 months old she started eating cereal and has since graduated to eating three meals a day with us and some little snacks between. By meals I mean baby food. As you may remember from earlier posts, Kaelyn won't put ANYTHING in her mouth by herself. But she will let me put a spoon in and sometimes bits of cheerios and other finger foods. However, anytime I try real table food...fruit, green beans, cooked carrots, bread, chicken, whatever, she'll only allow ONE bite. Then starts pushing my hand away quite insistently if I try a second time. So baby food it is for now.

Kaelyn has been nursing every 3 1/2 hours for quite some time now and sometimes she doesn't seem particularly desperate to nurse at that time so I thought maybe it was time to try to stretch it to 4 hours. AND since Kaelyn STILL won't sleep through the night and I'm taking the easy way out at this time and letting her nurse when she gets up sometimes just so she'll go back to sleep and let me go back to bed, I figure she probably isn't STARVING to nurse right when she gets up. Last night she ate at 4:15am and got up for the day around 6. Instead of nursing her AGAIN I put her in her stroller to play and showered, then we ate breakfast together. I made her cereal and apples and cherries and she ate well. She didn't seem to care about nursing really until 8:15am so things were going well. THen I hoped that she would eat lunch (solids) around noon or even 11:30 and nurse again by 1. However, at 11:15 she got real screamy and refused to try any solids so I threw the whole idea out and nursed her. After that we went back to our regular pattern.

So maybe she's not ready? Maybe she knows what she wants and it's NOT baby food pears when she knows she can have mama milk? I don't know. I'm not sure where to go next with it. Maybe wait awhile longer until she eats REAL table food a little better and fills up more. She never turns a nursing session down from being too full at this point. NEVER. I really wanted to be mostly done nursing when she turned a year old but I don't really have high hopes for that at the moment. But a lot can change in two months so who knows.

My other idea is not one I care to actually try but I may have to at some point. I might try not feeding her at night. I've done it before and she lasted pretty well till 5am. But it's hard at 3am when she's screaming and I know she'd go RIGHT back to sleep if I just let her nurse. It's hard to NOT do that when the alternative is listening to her scream for an hour or more and BOTH of us losing sleep. So I might try that soon but I haven't quite convinced myself at the 3am time of day!


Besides being a little out of sorts because of my experimentations, today was fun. My friend Andrea and her son Logan came over to play. MAJOR toy explosion. Logan finds toys around here I didn't even know we had! And then Kaelyn has a blast with them after they leave so it works well! It's so nice to see him enjoy new (to him!) toys and Kaelyn likes watching him run around. In the meantime Andrea and I can chat and the time goes SO much faster. I wish we lives in the same neighborhood so it was easy to get together even at the last minute. What do you do. We're doing our best to get together every week or so anyways.

Perhaps my next post can report that Kaelyn is sleeping through the night AND weaning herself easily from breastfeeding. And hey, while I'm at it, maybe she will be potty trained as well. I guess that probably would only be likely if I don't post again until she's, what, 2...3? But hey, a girl can dream, right?