I have been say­ing this for a while now, and I’m wait­ing for evo­lu­tion to start work­ing on this for me, but I think it’s prob­a­bly not going to hap­pen in my life­time. I sup­pose instead of wait­ing for my extra set of arms, I could look for other solu­tions to my prob­lems. Right now, the biggest rea­son I need (a.k.a. want) that extra set of arms is because A is want­ing to be held a LOT, and I’m try­ing to plan a birth­day party for Jason for this Saturday!

Last night, we were at Tar­get, and I had quite a few things to get. Just as we were in the pop aisle (as I write this, I’m cring­ing think­ing about all the high fruc­tose corn syrup sit­ting in my base­ment!), A decided that he was done with the cart. So, I am push­ing the huge orangey-red dou­ble cart from Tar­get, hold­ing A on one hip, try­ing to con­vince K not to take his seat­belt off and to stay in the cart, and try­ing to find the side of the 12-pack that has the han­dle on it. Why, Mr. Coke Man, do you put it on the shelf with the han­dle side down or to the side? I would love to see the han­dles on the TOP! Anyway…

So, as I’m doing that, i’m break­ing out in a sweat, and my heart is start­ing to pound. I’m hop­ing that I don’t drop either A or the 12-pack of Diet Coke with Lime that I man­aged to palm since I couldn’t find the han­dle. A decides that he’s done being held, and he flips his body down toward the ground. I threw the pop on my cart, and I grabbed him securely. Then, I thought, why am I not wear­ing him???

I cur­rently own two baby car­ri­ers. One is a Kozy Car­rier that I bought when K was about 7 months old. The other car­rier we own is an Ergo Car­rier. If you’re not a baby wear­ing, baby car­rier buy­ing per­son, you might won­der just how many car­ri­ers a mom might need. Well, for me, the answer is at least one more. The Kozy is great. I really like it, but I lent it to my cousin’s wife in June, and I’m hop­ing she’s get­ting a lot of use out of it. (Hmmm, maybe need to check on her and see how it’s going) So, I have my Ergo in my car with me most of the time. A really doesn’t like to be worn in back car­ries. I think he likes to see my face and feel closer to me. He also is pretty tall, so he’s not as easy to wear in the front car­ries as he used to be. That leaves me hip car­ries. The Kozy is a good hip car­rier, but right now mine’s not here. The Ergo, how­ever, doesn’t lend itself eas­ily to a hip carry. You have to unclip the straps and rearrange them. So, I think that instead of wait­ing on evo­lu­tion to give me my sec­ond set of arms, I should buy another car­rier!

Right now, I’m really inter­ested in the Etc. Sling. A friend of mine makes these, and they are very comfy and very rea­son­ably priced. The town where I live is not a huge baby­wear­ing hub, but in gen­eral, if you see a mom (or dad) wear­ing a child, there’s prob­a­bly a 60% chance they are using the Etc. Sling that Erin made. Maybe in a week or two, I will have a new post rav­ing about my new sling! I’m hop­ing.

K and A, that is. I just love watch­ing them as they expe­ri­ence some­thing new for the first time or as they learn to do some­thing. Lately, A has been prac­tic­ing stand­ing up with­out hold­ing on to any­thing. He will crawl up to me, Jason, or a piece of fur­ni­ture (yes, I just com­pared myself and my hus­band to fur­ni­ture!), stand there for a moment, and then let go. When he does, he gets a huge grin on his face and plops down on his butt. He is so proud of him­self for doing that on his own. It’s so amaz­ing to watch him. K has been exper­i­ment­ing with lan­guage and words lately. He has started singing along with us when we sing a few of his favorite songs. He is also using new words on a daily basis. Recently, he has started using “both” and “either.”

I have a friend, who I respect a lot, that said some­thing once that really got me think­ing. She said that she had read some­where that every time you do some­thing for a child, you take away his oppor­tu­nity to learn it for him­self. Now, there are some­thing I obvi­ously want to be a part of my child learn­ing, but other things I want to stand back and let him dis­cover the world on his own. The other thing that she had said that got me think­ing was so often we as adults tell kids how to play with par­tic­u­lar toys. Some­times, we tend to get too caught up in the right way to play with some­thing that we for­get about let­ting the child decide what is the right way to play. For exam­ple, we have this lit­tle duck key chain that Jason’s friend, Harry, gave us. K played with it for a while, and then he got bored with it. That was until he found a new use for it. The duck isn’t just a duck. It has a lit­tle but­ton on the side, and when you push it, a light turns on and it quacks. Well, of course, in the mind of a 2 year old, the duck became a cam­era! As some­one who likes rules and likes to do things the “right” way, I never would have thought to tell him it could be used as a cam­era. He fig­ured that out on his own, and he loves tak­ing our pic­tures with his duck cam­era. Maybe he takes after his aunts who are photographers.

I think over the course of the next sev­eral months, I will prob­a­bly be chang­ing my blog top­ics up a lit­tle. When I was breast­feed­ing K fre­quently or when A was born and I was feed­ing both boys fre­quently, I felt like I had a lot more to say about nurs­ing specif­i­cally. Now that they’re get­ting older, it’s just some­thing that’s an every day part of our lives. It just is. I don’t think or worry about it too much. We’ve got­ten over most of the hur­dles and pit­falls. A is sleep­ing bet­ter, and K has kept up his 2 a day nurs­ing rou­tine for the past few weeks.

Some of the top­ics that I have become more inter­ested in lately are healthy eat­ing, green liv­ing, cook­ing, exer­cise, and expand­ing my read­ing reper­toire. Maybe I’ll fin­ish a book (with­out read­ing the end­ing ahead of time) and do a review of it. Who knows?

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!

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.

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.

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.

That is how often K has nursed in the past two days. Look­ing back, I can see that there has been a grad­ual decrease in his nurs­ing since win­ter ended and spring started. I think it’s even pos­si­ble that dur­ing the times we were trapped inside due to weather, he nursed for some­thing to do. Now that he’s get­ting older (2 years, 8 months), it wouldn’t be out of the ordi­nary for him to start mov­ing more and more toward wean­ing, I suppose.

I have never had a goal in mind for him as far as age goes, but I think I would like it if he could hang on until he turned 3. That’s a nice round num­ber, right? I’m just not ready to con­sider him a grad­u­ated nursling yet! I know that he could hang onto just these two nurs­ing ses­sions for a long time, and I hope he does, but only TWO in one day?!?!?!? That was a big sur­prise when I real­ized just how lit­tle he has been nurs­ing lately. Def­i­nitely bittersweet.

At least if he weans, I will still be nurs­ing A. A is show­ing no signs of wean­ing, and it looks very pos­si­ble that he could nurse as long or longer than K based on his nurs­ing ses­sions at this point.

When I was in col­lege and for the years after before I was preg­nant with K, I was a semi-regular blood dona­tor (is that a word?). In fact, Jason’s cousin tried to con­vince Jason that one time when Jason and I went to donate blood together was actu­ally our first date. It wasn’t by the way. I just didn’t want to go alone.

Any­way, after I had K, I was inter­ested in donat­ing blood again, but I had a hard time find­ing any infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject. Most of the infor­ma­tion I found said that it was allowed but it was a mom’s choice whether or not it would work for her. Well, that didn’t help me much. I checked on the La Leche League web­site and the Amer­i­can Red Cross web­site although it seems they have changed their lay­out and that infor­ma­tion is no longer avail­able. I found a few specifics, but I didn’t find a hard yes or no answer.

When I had A, I had a fairly sig­nif­i­cant over­sup­ply of milk after he was born and had to (and still have to) take steps to con­trol my sup­ply to allow him to be able to nurse with­out get­ting over­whelmed by the milk. Because of this, I felt more con­fi­dent in choos­ing to donate. I thought I would wait until he was 6 months old and tak­ing some solids just in case I did have a dip in sup­ply. Well, he’s now almost 8 months and not tak­ing solids. I just couldn’t wait any longer. In my absence from donat­ing, Jason has caught up to my dona­tions and sur­passed me! I need to get donat­ing again.

I made my appoint­ment, and the day I was sup­posed to go was –38 degrees with a –54 degree wind­chill. Need­less to say, I did not go that day. I just couldn’t jus­tify tak­ing my 2 boys out in that weather for any­thing other than an emer­gency. I resched­uled my appoint­ment and went the next week. I really didn’t do much to pre­pare ahead of time. I made sure that I was drink­ing extra water and eat­ing well the days before. My appoint­ment went well. When the woman put the nee­dle in to draw blood, she had a lit­tle trou­ble find­ing the vein. That resulted in me being a bit sore that night and the next day, but it wasn’t any­thing terrible.

I know that one person’s anec­do­tal expe­ri­ence doesn’t replace the advice of a doc­tor or lac­ta­tion con­sul­tant, but I hope it helps at least a lit­tle bit if this is a deci­sion you’ve been try­ing to make for yourself.

This morn­ing, at my MOPS group, our speak­ers were a local cou­ple, and they talked about inti­macy in mar­riage. I know that when many peo­ple think of inti­macy, they think of sex. How­ever, this cou­ple talked about inti­macy out­side of sex. They talked about being open, hon­est, and vul­ner­a­ble with each other. They talked about spend­ing time together as friends and just being. It was great to see a cou­ple mar­ried 31+ years dis­cuss these issues. They also dis­cussed their ear­li­est mem­o­ries of inti­macy as being with their par­ents (her with her mom, and him with his dad).

The more I thought about inti­macy in rela­tion­ships, the more I thought about nurs­ing and breast­feed­ing. It’s a very pri­vate, inti­mate, and open rela­tion­ship that a child and a mom have while nurs­ing. Look­ing at my rela­tion­ships with both K and A, I can say that I really see a close­ness in my rela­tion­ship with K that I don’t have yet with A. Hav­ing spent at least a cou­ple hours a day nurs­ing him almost every day for the past 2 years has def­i­nitely devel­oped that rela­tion­ship. I also see an inti­macy in my rela­tion­ship with A that I didn’t have with K. Because A has been such a high-needs baby, I have so much time with him. It’s also been pretty intense time over the past seven months.

After hear­ing the cou­ple speak today, I began to think about my boys’ future rela­tion­ships, and I hope that in some way, hav­ing this rela­tion­ship with me will be the begin­ning of a life­time of expe­ri­ences that allow them to expe­ri­ence inti­macy (in many ways) with those in their futures.