Episode 384

My last podcast was a show on weaning in which I had the honor of interviewing Winema Wilson Lanoue who wrote: A Loving Weaning – How to Move Forward together.

It was such a pleasure to listen to her share valuable information to my listeners as well as have her answer questions of my listeners. Listening to her speak brought back a flood of memories of my own weaning experiences. I had to hang tight as I tried my best not to interrupt her because so many things she said, reminded me of my own weaning days. There are all these little tid bits that I had not thought about in years.

I thought it would be fun for me to share some of my weaning moments with you. I need to give you just a bit of background first as this might help you understand some of the things I will be sharing with you today. I often feel that I am really showing my age when I share this kind of stuff with you and while others kind of freak out on me and say – what are you doing? Why are you letting people know how old you are – I take it all in my stride.

I have a different opinion than others might have who don’t really like to tell other people their age. I am proud to say that I am 62. I am grateful for all that I have in my life.

I sure do appreciate the fact that I have had the pleasure of being able to enjoy 62 years of walking this earth. I am incredibly grateful for the just about 40 years of marriage that Alan and I have had with each other. In this crazy world we live in, I feel pretty darn lucky to wake up to the same man every morning and actually enjoy being with him. I am equally as happy and blissful for the 35 years of motherhood that I have been blessed with.

As a side note, professionally, I have accrued over 30 years helping moms with breastfeeding. All my years or experience and the thousands of families that I have worked with in educating and helping with breastfeeding, well I bring all of this experience to every mom I meet with. I have had the pleasure of speaking about different topics on breastfeeding as a presenter at global lactation conferences and my presentations have been seen by thousands.

Now that you know how old I am, it would not surprise you to learn that my 3 beautiful children are 35, 32 and 30 years old. Girl, boy, Girl. Alisha Jesse and Carly. This may seem weird to you but there was no internet and the only book on breastfeeding was La Leche Leagues, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. You may have heard me say this before but I come from a long line of women who formula fed their babies. My grandmother formula fed her 2 kids, my mother formula fed her 5 kids, my aunt formula fed her 2 kids as did all of the others in my family and so did all the neighbors who I babysat for. And my sister formula fed her 2 kids and so did my sister-in-law. So I definitely had no role models. When I say I had little info about breastfeeding and in this case weaning, I really mean it – I had very little info on weaning! One could say that I was winging the weaning.

Let’s start with my beautiful first born, Alisha Heather. Little did I know back then, but now I know that the weaning process with Alisha started shortly after her first birthday and I have to blame it on Tina Turner, yup, it was all Tina Turners fault. ohhhh I blame it on The Beach Boys too!

I can hear you saying,, what the hey??? How can I possibly blame Tina Turner and the Beach Boys for all of this??? Well, it all started with my anniversary, which happens to be in June. Alisha also turned a year in June. Her birthday is one day before my anniversary.
It was a Tuesday. Ronald Reagan was president, Khloe Kardashian was born that day.Just sharing some points of reference,,, in case you cared.

So, Alisha was born on Tuesday and Alan and I celebrated our 4th Anniversary the very next day.
The following year, when Alisha turned 1, we were going to be celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary the next day. Well, I guess Alan wanted to make our 5th anniversary, super special so he did something super special. Alan bought us tickets to 2 shows.. yup you guessed it! Tina Turner and the Beach Boys.

For anyone who grew up on Long Island, you know that THE place to go to concerts in the summertime was at the Jones Beach Theatre. It was right on the water and it made for a beautiful concert setting – with seats outdoors, and right on the bay. I was use to going to concerts there BK, before kids. It was a no brainer then. Get off work and head out to the beach. But AK, after kids, it proved to be quite the ordeal, as one might imagine.

So, here I was, a year into mothering, many triumphs with everything that goes along with becoming a mom, muddling my way through the postpartum period, going from being isolated and no mommy friends to meeting quite a few and finding my tribe. It was a year of many ups and downs with early breastfeeding, round the clock nursing, lack of sleep. Date night? forget it! There were like zilch dates on the town with the husband, who worked long hours to provide for his family while I was a SAHM.

Sure, We dreamed about having a few good fun nights out,, just like old times. I definitely whined about it frequently enough, I guess Alan really heard me. So, he bought tickets to 2 concerts. After a quick jump up and down, my first thoughts were: sooooo what am I suppose to do with Alisha? For the first 6 months of her life, I lived an hour away from our families. The second 6 months we moved and lived in the same town. So, while we were close to family, noone babysat because I wasn’t ready and she still nursed to sleep.

Have you ever been given an absolutely wonderful gift from someone you love & then realized that for one reason or another, it did not hold the same excitement as it had at another time in your life? Well, this is it for me! Going to listen to some great music at the beach in the summer, was one of my favorite things to do… I am sure Alan watched my initial excitement fade as I got a knot in my stomach as I said: what about Alisha??

My beautiful baby loved to nurse herself to sleep and I was actually totally fine with this. Except now that I wanted to get to the Jones Beach Theatre by 7:00, and Alisha Heather was first having her last feeding of the day closer to 8-9:00 pm.

She never took a bottle… Well, minus the 2 trials – once in the hospital and once when she was 3 months old and I went to a wedding. She was offered the bottle, but never took it. This bothered other people, but it did not bother me. I was happy to be exclusively breastfeeding her. We had started sippy cups and she did drink water from it.

Sounds crazy now that I talk about – but I did not pump. I had one very scary pumping experience and just never did so again. and I did not know about hand expression. Noone every talked about it and I had not really thought to hand express. Sound so strange to me now as I talk about hand expression all the time and like to teach it to the moms I work with.

I wasn’t concerned with any lack of fluids or nutrition if she missed that night time breastfeeding, I just did not know if she would go to sleep because this has been a constant since she was born.

I knew I needed to wean her from that last night nursing so I could leave in time to get to concert in time. If I could not, to me that meant I could not go.

So, I started the weaning process. I use those words now, but back then, the words I used were… gotta get her to not nurse to sleep. I did not realize that this was the beginning of the weaning process. I had no one to tell me that once I started eliminating a feeding, that this was the beginning of the weaning process.

Here is how it played out for us –

I did not even try and wean her before that very first concert. My husband was rarely home at that time and I just couldn’t see me saying no to her while she tried to hop on board for a nursing. I just had my mother come over and babysit and she just played with her. There was no purposeful, now it is bedtime and expect her to just lay down to sleep, they just played until Alisha eventually fell asleep.

The next night, is was business as usual and she nursed herself to sleep. We kept going like this until the next concert which was a month or so later and we did the same thing. She did not seem to mind it at all when I was away and she was distracted playing until she was so exhausted she fell asleep.

The concerts were fabulous. In addition to having a great time, I also got a taste of the night life. Meaning,,, I realized that I could go out in the early evening and stay out late. I liked this freedom! She was a year old, after all.

Since she seemed to be okay as long as she was distracted, I decided to try and wean her from that early evening feeding a few months later. I was hoping to give myself a break so that I could go out a few evenings here and there as I had become more involved in Mothers Center, a group for moms who met on a regular basis to talk about issues related to mothering. I was volunteering on a few committees and they met at night to get some real work done as it was too hard when our kids were under foot. Since I was not returning to paid work, I loved becoming involved in committees such as fundraising and newsletter. This was a place where I was getting to use my mind in constructive ways besides playing with kids all day. It was a wonderful creative outlet for me. I loved my volunteer work and I loved making new friends.

So, while I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but about 16 months or so, Alisha was not needing that last feed to fall asleep and she was now finally sleeping through the night – something I never, ever, ever thought would happen. It is funny how things in life go. Before I had Alisha, I could never have imagined exactly what it would be like to have a baby attached to the boob, seemingly all day and night. And then, several months into new motherhood and EBF, I could not imagine life without a baby at my breast.

I also do not remember exactly when she was fully weaned as over the next several months, she gradually lost interest in the daytime nursings and for a while was down to just waking up and nursing and soon that was gone too. While I do know that she was no longer breastfeeding at about 18 months, I have to say, I honestly do not remember all the details surrounding it and I also don’t remember exactly when her last nursing time was. I do have a bit of sadness about not having committed her last nursing to memory, but it was one of those things that went like – well yesterday she did nurse in the am and then 2-3 days went by when she didn’t nurse and she just started right out with breakfast, etc. and then maybe a few days later did again and it went like this for several weeks and at some point one day just rolled into the next and at some point I realize she had not nursed in a week or so and we were done.

At the time, I don’t even remember being sad about being done – I’m sad now when I think of it. I don’t even remember marking what the date was. I’m sad now that I don’t have that date marked down in her baby book. Weaning… well, It just happened. Thank goodness that with all those months and thousands of nursings, Alisha was a cuddler and still loved sitting on my lap, reading and playing. I did not realize it then, but it did occur to me while listening to Winema that we still kept our closeness, which is one of the gifts we both had from our breastfeeding days.

Now, the story with my other two is different, but I will say that with all the knowledge I have now, there was still much that I did not know then. As hard as breastfeeding was with Alisha, it was so incredibly easy with my beautiful baby boy Jesse Wade. I was in no pain with Jesse. I was in excruciating pain with Alisha. Jesse fell asleep while nursing and stayed asleep for a good couple of hours. Alisha may have fallen asleep at the breast, but honestly most of the times when I tried to put her down, she woke up. While Alisha was right on the curve of normal weight gainers, Jesse plumped out quickly, had a lovely double chin and had those delicious rolls you just wanna squeeze! Jesse was just easy schmeazy and I planned on breastfeeding him however long he wanted and basically had no specific plan. At this point, I did know that I would have liked for him to breastfeed longer than Alisha did.

One of the things I greatly missed out on was one of the easiest ways I had in my mothering toolbox to calm a crying toddler down. Breastfeeding always worked with Alisha when and once she weaned I had to work harder to calm her down, to stop a tantrum, to put her to sleep. So, I figured life would be easier if I could nurse Jesse well into toddlerhood. Plus, at this time, I had become involved with alternative mothering groups. I was around many toddlers who nursed well into their second and third year. My observations were that these kids were pretty darn healthy and I realized that if it was at all in my power to do so, I wanted to continue to give them mega doses of human milk that was chock full or antibodies and immune factors.

I also was able to observe many families who had nursed their babies well into toddlerhood and now that they were of Kindergarten and older school aged kids, I could see that these were some of the most independent kids I had been around. They were all sleeping on their own, after having co-slept with their parents for many years. All of the arguments that my family and friends had about nursing beyond a year and co-sleeping were definitely not an issue with these families. So, I was grateful to witness this in real life and was very happy to have gained the confidence to follow my intuition.

So, with Jesse, he just carried on nursing well into his second year. At this time, he was sleeping through the night and nursings could be anywhere between 5 and 6 times a day or 2 or 3 times a day. It just depended on him. I do remember that there was one specific time of the day that he never missed and that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Back in those days, Oprah was on at 4:00 in the afternoon. I so much looked forward to this time of day. I loved Oprah and by that time of day, I was pretty spent and looked forward to the break. Jesse would have a nice long leisurely nursing. Once he started to nurse, he would usually fall asleep and I didn’t have to worry about tending to him during Oprah. I would set up a snack for Alisha and she would sit on the arm of our favorite lazy boy chair. She would sit with a bowl of fruit or cereal and watch a bit of Oprah with me and soon climb down and play on the floor with her barbie dolls. This turned out to be “my time” as my kids were the least needy of me now as they were compared to the whole rest of the day. It was the calm before the storm – dinner, bath, storytime and bedtime.

So you can imagine how I felt one day when Jesse was about 2 1/2 years old and all of a sudden seemed to lose interest in breastfeeding overnight! I remember that I got Alisha’s snack ready, turned on the TV, settled into the lazy boy chair and prepared to watch Oprah. Jesse climbed on my lap and started nursing… and a few seconds later he popped off and made a funny face,,, like when you taste something like sour pickles or a sour candy… and then when I encouraged him to come back to the breast, he just started laughing. Now at this time in his life, I was use to him being a distracted nurser so I did not think much of it. Usually though, he would go on for a few minutes, then pop off, laughing, engaging in play with his sister, pop back on, nurse for a few minutes and keep on this until he was just done and climbed off my lap.

But this particular day, he laughed and climbed right down. In a few minutes, he was making too much noise with his sister, so I was like – Jesse, come on up, let’s nurse. You know, watching Oprah and having some chill time was something I desperately needed. So, Jesse came back on my lap, and as he had done before, and he lasted a few seconds and then popped right off. This happened several more times and I just gave up. Later on in the evening, I offered again and he literally stood there shaking his head from side to side… no- no-no he said. I thought it was odd, but being busy with the bedtime routine, I just carried on.

Now it is the next day and he did not want to nurse in the am and at some point in the afternoon, I sat down and expected him to come up and nurse and he didn’t. 4:00 rolles aroundNow it is time for Oprah and he sat on my lap, latched on, lasted maybe a minute and then pushed off and climbed down. At this point, I started to become a bit pushy… come on Jess, don’t you want to nurse?? No, no, no. I asked again and again and he kept rejecting me. Well, others might not think this was a rejection, but that is how I took it. Now, I was a bit of a crazy person when he refused to nurse at night. The next day, no amount of my urging could get my beautiful baby boy to breastfeed….. anymore. Clearly he was done.

But me… I was so baffled. I just did not understand what was going on. It feels so crazy and quite embarrassing to me, to admit this, but I never knew exactly what happened, until years later when I was studying to become an IBCLC. I was with about 25 other breastfeeding educators who were studying to become an IBCLC. There were many light bulb moments in that class for many of us students who were rather clueless as young breastfeeding mothers. Now, we had the science of it all explained to us. Even that was 21 years ago and there has been so much more evidence based research on many issues related to breastfeeding.

Sooooo, why do you think Jesse just stopped nursing… literally overnight!

Well, I was close to the end of my first trimester when this happened. I learned in that class I took that it is common for your supply to drop during your pregnancy. I thought that this might have been why as it made good sense. Barely any milk, what’s there to interest a busy toddler who loved following his big sister around. Nothing much, so I can see him losing interest and this certainly seemed like a good explanation. I remember nudging one of my friends, who was also taking this entry level breastfeeding educator class, and said: that is what happened with Jesse… he just lost interest because there was no milk.

But a few days later, we learned about weaning. We learned about nursing strikes and how sometimes these are mistaken for weaning. We learned about different ways that babies can wean… on their own, gradually, sometimes it is parent led by eliminating feedings, shortening the feeding sessions, abrupt weaning. One of the most interesting things I have heard is how your milk changes.

Back then, I did not know so much about human milk. My knowledge base 35 years ago was basic:

human milk for human babies. At that time, I was already not drinking dairy myself. So, it did not seem natural to me to feed it to my baby. Although I did not know anyone who was breastfeeding and I had seen just one small article about it in a magazine, it just seemed that I should be breastfeeding my baby and giving her species specific milk. I was not motivated by the benefits per se, because all we really knew is that it was “better for babies . it had all sorts of antibodies that would beneficial for them, that they could not get from formula. There was also a lot of sugar in formula and I had gotten away from eating too much sugar. So, it did not seem reasonable for me to feed my baby a product with cows milk and sugar. That was just as simplistic as my thinking was.

Given my lack of knowledge, I also did not know something else at the time that Jesse weaned. In the class I learned that our milk changes flavor, sometimes it is more subtle and other times it is more noticeable. Well, I practically jumped out of my chair when I learned in this entry level breastfeeding class that the concentration of protein, sodium and iron increases and the lactose concentration decreases during the weaning phase, giving the milk a more salty taste or perhaps even a sour taste, or at the very least, a flavor that your kiddo might just not like.

I immediately connected to that first time that Jesse gave me a funny face and climbed off my lap. He did that several other times, but I just thought it was part of his playing around. Now I am convinced that, the volume was very low and probably tasted yukky to him and he was like.. no more, I’m outta here. So a majority of the weaning was quite gradual, but those last 3 feedings he was probably getting less and less so there was little adjustment for my body to make, so no clogged ducts for me.

I admit to spending a few days being sad, however, I was quite pregnant with my third and turned this change into lemonade. I said to myself: Well, he was getting heavy laying on my lap nursing. He was so handsy with his fingers all in my face — poking my eyes and putting up my nose and sticking in between my lips. He would nurse a minute or so and then use his arms to swat away at his older sister. I realized: I was okay with giving up acrobatic nursing, more than likely made easier by knowing there was going to be another baby to nurse.

Now, that other baby, my baby, #3 because she was my last. Well, Carly was born in August and thank goodness breastfeeding her was so easy. I did not suffer one minute with any breast or nipple pain, I enjoyed a good supply and she loved nursing and plumped out quickly. Everything about this experience was the opposite of all the pain and emotional suffering with my first, in the early months of breastfeeding.

Carly was born at home, just like my son Jesse was. I felt so great after her birth, that I walked outside the next morning, when she was about 8 hours old and showed her off to the neighbors! I was a very busy mom, active with my other two kids and all their activities at this point. My first, Alisha was starting Kindergarten, so Carly, well, I joke that she just sort of.. came along for the ride. Thank goodness she was a pretty mellow personality and was quite flexible as far as where she slept and how she ate. This poor child is in my arms breastfeeding with 2 other little kids running circles around me, playing at my feet, climbing on the couch, standing up and patting her on the head while she ate. While I was grateful that this was a much easier breastfeeding journey, I also had quite a bit of sadness in that it was not this.. quiet time – let’s sit down and nurse and bond with each other and get to know each other. Sure there were quiet times in the late evening and throughout the night and early am, however, Carly spent much of her daytime nursings in a pretty noise and active environment. Something else I had to let go of. What else could a busy mom of 3 do? There was no way that I could quietly go off to an other room to sit quietly and breastfeed.

I nursed Carly long enough for her to be quite verbal and tell me what she liked and didn’t like. We would argue with each other about her roaming hands during nursing also. I had long hair, loved to wear long earrings and had glasses – there were plenty of places for her to get in trouble with and things that annoyed me at times. And yet, overall, I loved breastfeeding with Carly and I just let her do her own thing. I was busy with kids and while I know that she nursed for 3 1/2 years, I don’t remember the exact last nursing, so I don’t remember the date exactly.

I do wish that I would have realized the importance of each one of my kids very last nursings. I just never knew that I would really care… but now, being a lactation consultant, I just wish I knew. Sounds silly to you perhaps? Oh well, another one of the hazards of being a lactation consultant. We get a bit weird about such things.I do remember that she was down to nursing in the am and in pm and days could go by where she had no interest in the daytime and then she would here and there. I do know that Carly gradually reached a point where she was only nursing when she woke up. I also remember thinking at the time,,, I could probably do this forever as it was so easy, and just a few minutes and I was fine with this.

Alisha was more planned and if I had to do it all over, I probably would have not encouraged eliminating nursing times and just let her go on her own as I am sure this is why she weaned so much earlier than the other ones. While I did suffer with cracked and bleeding nipples, milk transfer issues, a few clogged ducts and 1 yeast infection during all my years of nursing, I am very glad that I did not suffer with engorgement or clogged ducts or breast infection during the weaning process, as so often happens when it happens to quick.

In our interview, Winema said something that was quite profound for me to hear and I wanted to highlight this to anyone who is weaning. She talked about how important it was to keep your children close, lots of hugs and cuddles and sitting close to each other should continue, even when weaning ends. Our kids may not be at the breast getting fed, but they do need to be close, feeling, touching, smelling and connecting with us.

My greatest wish for you and weaning, is that you understand that for as long as your baby breastfeeds, you are passing on valuable nutrients to them. You are spending time with your babies that you will never, ever, be able to get back. This time period in both of your lives, just flies by and so you should keep you and your babies needs in mind when thinking about weaning and if you are not ready to wean, please don’t allow others in your life to have control over your breastfeeding journey. Always ask yourself: what do you want? what is best for my baby?
My greatest wish as you near the end of your breastfeeding journey is to be able to wean,,, gradually,,, and with love.