A cou­ple peo­ple have brought to my atten­tion that when they leave com­ments on my blog, they are receiv­ing an error. I’m sorry about that! I didn’t even real­ize it was hap­pen­ing. Nor­mally, I get an e-mail telling me some­one has left a com­ment. When I real­ized that I hadn’t been receiv­ing them, Jason started to inves­ti­gate. He tried a few things, and he thought maybe it was the theme (back­ground) that I had on my blog. He thought maybe it wasn’t com­pat­i­ble with the newest ver­sion of word­press. So, I changed my theme. If you’re read­ing this on a feed reader, stop in. It looks really nice if I say so myself. Any­way, Jason is still work­ing on it. If you leave a com­ment, they are going through. Hope­fully it will be fixed soon.

Yuck. I do not like those tran­si­tions. Going from three naps to two didn’t seem to be too tough. Going from two down to one is not pretty at our house. Lately, A has been fight­ing his morn­ing nap. He used to go down okay, and then about three hours later, he’d take his after­noon nap. Well, in the last week, the morn­ing nap has become a strug­gle. So, for the past few days, we have tried to go with­out it. Nei­ther option is great. Today, A had a 8 minute nap on the way to town to get gas and go to the library. Then, he was pretty sleepy dur­ing lunch, so I laid him down think­ing that he should sleep for at least an hour or two. Well, after forty-five min­utes, he was up. I tried to help him go back to sleep, but he didn’t think that was a good idea. So, right now, we’re at 12 months old, awake from 7am to 7 or 8pm, and 1 hr of sleep give or take 10 min­utes. Maybe tomor­row will be bet­ter?
I keep try­ing to remind myself not to get too frus­trated, because as with any­thing else at this age, it’s a phase and it can change overnight. Hope­fully tonight is that night!

Well, it looks like I started the Great Lip­stick Chal­lenge a lit­tle too early. Accord­ing to the “offi­cial” blog, it doesn’t start until August 1st. So, I revise my pre­vi­ous post. Don’t look for my lip­stick today or tomor­row. Wait until August 1. Then, I’ll share the results of my step out of my com­fort zone.

Since A is now one, I guess I am now offi­cially an extended, tan­dem nurser! Woohoo! K is two and will be three in Novem­ber and still nurs­ing. I recently had some­one ask me how I decided to nurse him for so long. Really, it wasn’t a one time deci­sion that I made. It was sev­eral smaller deci­sions made along the way. Many peo­ple decide to stop nurs­ing at twelve months and are sur­prised when I tell them I don’t plan to wean A any time soon. Those same peo­ple are gen­er­ally even more sur­prised to find out that not only will I not wean A soon, K is still nurs­ing, too. :

Since I decided to put a link to my web­site in my Face­book page, I thought now is as good a time as any to answer some of those ques­tions. I don’t feel like I need to defend my deci­sion, and I’m not try­ing to tell any­one else what they should do for their fam­ily. I sim­ply like to talk about breast­feed­ing and other par­ent­ing issues. Thus, I have a blog pretty much ded­i­cated to doing just that!

When K was born, I had my share of strug­gles learn­ing to nurse him. He was early. He needed a shield to latch. He didn’t latch for the first sev­eral days of life. He had jaun­dice. He was a sleepy baby. I am sure there are a cou­ple oth­ers I could list, but luck­ily, those first weeks have faded a lit­tle in my mem­ory and now I remem­ber them mostly with rose col­ored glasses. My first goal was to nurse him for 6 weeks. Once I made that goal, my next goal became three months. Once I made that goal, I decided to go big and made my goal twelve months. Well, by the time K was a year old, I was preg­nant with A. I knew that sta­tis­ti­cally most babies will wean dur­ing a mother’s preg­nancy. I also knew that K still depended on nurs­ing for com­fort and nutri­tion through­out the day and some­times through the night, too. I fig­ured that since 70% of babies wean dur­ing a mother’s preg­nancy, he would too, and I would let him decide when that time was instead of decid­ing for him.

Well, as my preg­nancy pro­gressed, K still seemed to need “mommy milk” in a very real way that wasn’t met in any other man­ner. I can’t say that nurs­ing while preg­nant was the eas­i­est thing I have ever done or the most com­fort­able. How­ever, it was some­thing I did for K because he needed, wanted, and liked it

K was 20.5 months old when A was born. At that point, being able to nurse both K and A was a tremen­dous help in the tran­si­tion from one child to two. K was still very young and still needed a lot of mommy time. Because of that, I decided to allow him to con­tinue nurs­ing on demand. I felt as though choos­ing to have A was a deci­sion that Jason and I made. K had no part in that deci­sion, so I didn’t think that hav­ing A should be the rea­son he was no longer able to nurse. At that point, it became my goal to allow K to choose his own date for wean­ing. I reserve the right to change my mind in the case of any unforseen cir­cum­stances, but at this point, I hope to achieve child-led weaning.

Now, I am cur­rently nurs­ing A who is also past twelve months. Because of the pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence I have had with nurs­ing K, I hope to also allow A to make the deci­sion of child-led wean­ing for him­self. Also, with A being sen­si­tive to dairy, we won’t be intro­duc­ing cow’s milk or other dairy prod­ucts to him for a while. Con­tin­u­ing to nurse him helps me to ensure that he’s get­ting fats, pro­teins, calo­ries, and other immuno­log­i­cal ben­e­fits dur­ing his toddlerhood.

What I’ve writ­ten are my per­sonal rea­sons for choos­ing extended and tan­dem nurs­ing for my fam­ily. There are also sev­eral resources that encour­age and sup­port extended nurs­ing. If you are inter­ested, here are a few:

Extended Nurs­ing Fact Sheet

Are there health ben­e­fits to nurs­ing past one year of age?

Breast­feed a Tod­dler– Why on Earth?

Breast­feed­ing Beyond a Year

Breast­feed­ing and the Use of Human Milk (AAP)

Pedi­a­tri­cians and par­ents should be aware that exclu­sive breast­feed­ing is suf­fi­cient to sup­port opti­mal growth and devel­op­ment for approx­i­mately the first 6 months of life and pro­vides con­tin­u­ing pro­tec­tion against diar­rhea and res­pi­ra­tory tract infec­tion. Breast­feed­ing should be con­tin­ued for at least the first year of life and beyond for as long as mutu­ally desired by mother and child.

The World Health Organization’s infant feed­ing recommendations

As a global pub­lic health rec­om­men­da­tion, infants should be exclu­sively breast­fed(1) for the first six months of life to achieve opti­mal growth, devel­op­ment and health(2). There­after, to meet their evolv­ing nutri­tional require­ments, infants should receive nutri­tion­ally ade­quate and safe com­ple­men­tary foods while breast­feed­ing con­tin­ues for up to two years of age or beyond.

Maybe instead of my post being called Word­less Wednes­day, I could call it Wordy Wednes­day.

For some time now, I’ve been look­ing for a fab­u­lous recipe for hum­mus. I’ve found a few that are fine. I found one that was decent. I also found one that was not good at all. I just haven’t found one that is great, though.

I really like the hum­mus from the store. It’s so expen­sive though for such a lit­tle con­tainer. I should be able to make my own for a frac­tion of the price, right? Well, I can make my own, but it’s missing…something. Mine seems to have a bland taste and not be rich and deep like the fla­vor of the store bought hummus.

My recipes are all pretty sim­i­lar. They all con­tain chickpeas/garbanzo beans, olive oil, lemon juice, tahini, gar­lic, and salt. I just vary the pro­por­tions of each ingre­di­ent, but I just can’t get it right! Heather! Do you have any gourmet magic? Any­one else? Even sit­ting here, I’m get­ting a crav­ing now for some really good hum­mus. Too bad the stuff I made on Sun­day is just okay.

Last week, I signed up to join The Lip­stick Chal­lenge on a fel­low NaBloPoMo mommy blogger’s site. I got my sam­ples in the mail today. Thanks, Heather! So, for the next 7 days, I have at least one guar­an­teed post for each day!

I’ll be post­ing a pic­ture a day through the chal­lenge. Come back and check out my lips!

I think it’s been pretty obvi­ous in pre­vi­ous posts that A has not made it a pri­or­ity to spend any great amount of time asleep either at nap­time or at night. In fact, there have been times when I’ve won­dered if even as a teenager he would be wak­ing ever hour or two for some­thing. I know that’s not going to hap­pen, but some­times it’s hard to see fur­ther ahead than the next day or week or month.

So, in a (suc­cess­ful) effort to get more sleep, we decided that we would start sleep­ing with A in our bed. There were def­i­nitely mixed reviews on our deci­sion, although we weren’t really ask­ing for oth­ers’ opin­ions. We heard things like “Oh, do you really want to start that?” “That will be a hard habit to break.” “Oh, you should get so much more sleep that way!” and a few other vari­a­tions of those sen­ti­ments. After about six months, I ended up sleep­ing on the couch for sev­eral days while I suf­fered through some pretty annoy­ing aller­gies. A slept in his bassinet in our room for those nights and seemed to do bet­ter than he had been in our bed, so we went with his cues and kept him in there.

Because we were a sleep shar­ing fam­ily, I have been read­ing other people’s thoughts on co-sleeping and sleep shar­ing with a dif­fer­ent point of view lately. I have been notic­ing that there are usu­ally a few peo­ple in any dis­cus­sion or debate on this topic who offer the “I knew some­one who slept with their chil­dren, and now they are four and seven and still can’t sleep well” point of view. Hop­ing that wouldn’t be me, I got stuck think­ing about it over and over.

One day, I real­ized some­thing. Many par­ents who sleep with their chil­dren, don’t set out to have that hap­pen. I think a lot of par­ents visu­al­ize a child com­ing home from the hos­pi­tal, sleep­ing in the bassinet for a cou­ple weeks or months, and then sleep­ing in their room after that. That’s what I thought would hap­pen. It did not. So, many par­ents who sleep with their chil­dren start out doing so because their chil­dren are not great sleep­ers. They sleep with them because it’s the only way any­one gets any sleep. They have a fam­ily bed for a while, then even­tu­ally, the child goes on to sleep in their own crib or bed. Will this child sud­denly become a great sleeper? Prob­a­bly not. Will they still strug­gle get­ting to sleep or stay­ing to sleep? Maybe. Will they be a “bad” sleeper? Pos­si­bly. Will the fact that they are not a good sleeper or some may even say bad be because they shared a bed with their par­ents for a cou­ple weeks or months? No, not in my opinion.

That was what I was think­ing ear­lier while I was lay­ing down with A to help him fall asleep. Unfor­tu­nately, now I can­not remem­ber just what that great idea was. I’m sure it will come to me as soon as I post this one or even bet­ter, while I’m in the shower. So, be on the look out. I may have a flash of bril­liance com­ing up in one of my future posts!

When I was nurs­ing K, those words were some­times enough to make me stay home. I used a nip­ple shield with him for the first 3 months. He also took for­ever to fin­ish a feed­ing. Maybe it wasn’t really for­ever, but 45 min­utes is a long time when you are sit­ting at the DMV or in Burger King. As I’ve said before, A is a dif­fer­ent nurser com­pletely. He eats a lot more often, but he is much faster. Com­pared to K’s 45 minute nurs­ing ses­sions, A is an olympic sprinter!

With K, I was usu­ally able to plan my out­ings and errands around his rather pre­dictable 3–4 hour eat­ing sched­ule. A has been com­pletely dif­fer­ent. Until he was 8 months old, he was still eat­ing at least every 1–1.5 hours. Since then, he’s spread his day­time feed­ings out to about every 2 or 2.5 hours. Because of that, I’ve had to nurse in pub­lic far more often than I did with K. In fact, just this past Tues­day, I had the oppor­tu­nity to nurse in our local Applebee’s. Many of you who fol­low breast­feed­ing news know that Applebee’s hasn’t had the best pub­lic­ity in regards to nurs­ing moms. I am pleased to say that no one bat­ted an eye. A was nurs­ing when the wait­ress brought our food. Then, when she came back to check on us, he was still nurs­ing. So, while oth­ers have had other expe­ri­ences, I have to say that Applebee’s is one place that is on my list of “thumbs up to nurs­ing” places in our area.

This lit­tle guy has now brought us a year of love, bless­ings, and memories.

Now:

Then:

Excuse the eye makeup under my eyes. The pre­vi­ous 40 min­utes were a lit­tle intense.