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Infant feeding

Advice from extended BFers

5 replies

MilkMarketingBoob · 18/01/2007 11:49

DS is nearly two and I've planned to wait until he self-weans. I work full-time so he's been down to a couple of feeds most day since late 2005. The last six months or so he has started wanting to nurse more frequently at weekends and when I am around, which has been fine. But it's just continuing to escalate.

For example, most mornings now he's up at 4am wanting to come into bed with us for a feed -- I don't particularly mind that, but he wants to latch on from that point until it's time to get up. If I won't let him then he goes into full-on two-year-old tantrums, flinging himself about and screaming, and as he's an... ahem... "intense" child this can go on for some time. So one way or another DH and I don't get any sleep. And then about twenty minutes after he's got up he generally wants another feed. And if it's a weekend he seems to want a feed every hour at least if we are at home (he never askes when we are out).

Bringing this to a head is the fact that I'm now pregnant again (very early days, and I've not mentioned it on MN yet, hence the namechange). I am not going to be able to keep this up throughout pregnancy, and I am concerned about what effect his nursing like a newborn is going to have on my hormone levels (I know plenty of women nurse through pregnancy and tandem nurse with no problems, which is what I'd ideally like to do at the couple-of-feeds-a-day level).

So, I really need some advice. Can I get him to cut down a bit and if so, how?

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kiskidee · 18/01/2007 13:13

i co-sleep with dd who is almost 2 and find that she wants to stay latched on from 5 am onwards if she went to bed late the night before or otherwise wakes up too early. maybe (just maybe) he is getting too tired the day before? for the other things, i don't know because i have a milk monster.

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Notquitesotiredmum · 18/01/2007 14:39

I bf both of mine until they were 3/3.5 and do remember this increase at about 2. Eventually dh and I decided it would be better if I left the bed/left them with dh when they started this. I needed my sleep. It took three nights for them to get the idea that nights were for sleeping and that bf was OK in the day. Occasionally I had to 'abandon ship' again in the night, as a reminder, but they soon got the idea and happily carried on feeding for another 12/18 months in the daytimes.

Good luck.

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Notquitesotiredmum · 18/01/2007 14:41

(Oh, the first night involved me lying with my head under a pillow, whilst an outraged two year old bellowed for me for about three hours, and dh patiently explained that mummy was asleep and that he could feed in the morning. The second night it was 20 mmins and the third was seconds.)

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MilkMarketingBoob · 20/01/2007 20:29

Thank you. We're following your advice and having a "no feeding between going to bed and the alarm clock going off in the morning" rule, because I think the "only short feeds" rule was confusing him. He does seem to be getting the hang of it over the last couple of nights (I actually genuinely slept through one of his quests for a feed last night while DH handled him) and I feel far more confident about the whole thing.

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mamado · 20/01/2007 20:37

I bfed dd1 until she was 27 moths and stopped when i was 9 weeks pregnant with dd2. The first step was I had only fed at certain times from 18 months or so, then a few weeks into being pregnant my supply just got so much less. We also talked a lot about how my milk had nearly run out and it was all in her tummy! In the end I just didn't feed her one night saying there was no milk, did the same for a couple more days and she just never asked again, Its like she knew it was time to stop. It was so much easier than I expected. Also dd1 is alergic to milk so this meant going from bfing to no milk at all. I was expecting it to be so hard and was thinking of tandem feeding but it was so natural and unproblematic in the end!
Good luck with the route you take

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