Update

Thank you so much to all the friends and family who have emailed, called, posted, and otherwise sent good wishes this week on Project Wean. We're touched by everyone's interest and grateful for the support. I apologize here for not responding to everyone's thoughtfulness individually, but I decided that I would keep Edith company in her difficult task. If she could learn to forego the comfort of mommy milk all day, with only an early morning and a late night nursing session (more on that decision in a minute), then I could wean myself from checking my various forms of electronic communication more than twice a day, too. So I'm online just once before work and once in the evening, and that necessarily makes for more abbreviated communication (though hopefully increased dissertating).

I didn't want to jinx the weaning project by posting an update before we had established a new routine. But we're five days in now, and it has gone far better than we had reason to hope, to our great joy. Edith has not nursed during the day once since Sunday. There are easier days and harder days, but she has not thrown herself from the balcony, and she is not sitting keening in front of a wall. I think she's going to be fine.

On Sunday afternoon, when it was becoming clear what "all done with mommy milk" might really mean, she spent half an hour circling the park with Tom sobbing, "But I want my mommy milk!" while I sat a little ways out of sight. It was plain sorrow, not an angry tantrum. But once she got through that stretch, we realized that we could, in fact, hold the line against unwanted nursing. And confident about that, I decided that I would be fine keeping two scheduled nursing sessions a day: first thing in the morning and last thing before bed. So no one has to get up at 5:30, and I still get to nurse my little girl at the hour that she's most likely to be cuddly about it. After she has been brave all day, the bedtime nurse becomes a sweet reward.

It's ideal for now. Getting rid of all the public nursing, the incessant nursing, and the unpredictable nursing is already a huge change. And once we get to the point when she's no longer wheedling and whining to nurse, and when she also (hopefully) develops more coping mechanisms that don't involve my body, all the bad parts of nursing will be over for me. I'm happy to nurse twice a day at set times for the forseeable future.

In the short term, the tendency to act out all her feelings physically on mommy has increased, which I half-expected. Edith's emotions are close to the surface as she works through all this, and I can often tell how she's feeling based on whether I'm being caressed or harassed. She plays with my belly button more than ever. She struggles not to pinch and bite, sometimes unsuccessfully. She also hugs and kisses more than before, crawls into my lap and asks to be held in a baby position, and pokes her head under my shirt and announces that she's a baby inside my belly again. Verbally she goes from telling us proudly, "I be all done with mommy milk!" one moment to pleading, "Mommy, I want your milk!" or simply, "I NOT a big girl!" two minutes later. Sometimes she reverts to baby talk.

In general, these episodes pass fairly quickly, though. I think it has been an enormous help that we're doing this while she is home with Tom full-time, taking a daycare vacation for the month between his spring and summer semesters. Normally, right after daycare is when she's most strung out and desperate to nurse. But with our current set-up, not only is her day less stressful, but Tom is able to give her a pep talk about being brave, then fill her hands with snacks right before I show up, so that she is better emotionally equipped to handle that moment.

All things considered, I'm feeling a little sheepish about all the pre-weaning drama and indeed, that I didn't take the bull by the horns and start nursing on a schedule a year ago. Thanks to Leigh for sending along the posts about breastfeeding the demanding toddler from her mothers' listserve; some posters suggest that continuing on-demand nursing into the second year is ill-advised and that a mother can pro-actively replace on-demand feeding with scheduled feeding after a year. (Where was that advice when I needed it?) Otherwise, you stand to create a mess, putting no restrictions on this one behavior while starting to teach limits and rules about everything else. The kid tends to exploit the activity that seems ungoverned by rules, sensing it's the one place she has mom over a barrel. It sounds so obvious. How could I have unwittingly become that undisciplined parent whose kid runs riot over her?

So that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where we're cracking the whip from here on out. (Ha.) Has anyone seen the cartoon in this week's New Yorker, p. 78? It shows a baby sitting on the psychiatrist's couch; the psychiatrist is saying, "All righty, then--enough about breasts."

I think I'm going to laminate it.