K just turned 2 on Sat­ur­day. Two years! I can’t believe I have a two year old. Crazy. Some of our friends and fam­ily know this, and some don’t, but Kael is still nurs­ing, or STILL nurs­ing depend­ing on your perspective.

I know that peo­ple think if a child can ver­bal­ize their desire for mom’s milk, they don’t need it. I know that it’s def­i­nitely not the pop­u­lar thing to do. I know that some peo­ple think it’s weird. I know all that.

It’s still the right choice for me to con­tinue nurs­ing Kael though. Extended nurs­ing (past one year of age) has ben­e­fits for both mom and baby. Some ben­e­fits for the baby are the increased nutri­tion and fats that are in breast­milk com­pared to cow’s milk. Some of the ben­e­fits for mom are the decreased risks of sev­eral types of can­cer, osteoper­o­sis, and rheuma­toid arthritis.

I know that in the US, there are many women who set their breast­feed­ing goal for 12 months. For a while, that was my goal, too. Then, when K turned one, I real­ized that Novem­ber 4th wasn’t any dif­fer­ent than Novem­ber 3rd. Just because he was one and 1 day didn’t change any­thing for me or for him. I was still okay with breast­feed­ing, and he still wanted and needed it. He may have been able to drink cow’s milk instead of breast­milk for his liq­uid intake, but he has always been a child who needed his “mommy time.”

When he was young, he was eas­ily over­whelmed and over­stim­u­lated. Nurs­ing was one thing that would calm him down and some­times keep him from pro­gress­ing into a melt­down. As he grew older, he was more able to han­dle the stim­uli, but nurs­ing remained (and still remains) impor­tant to him. It’s a form of secu­rity and com­fort, and his need for those things is just as real and as impor­tant as his nutri­tional needs are.

My goal for nurs­ing him is to allow him to self-wean. If I were to become preg­nant before I weaned him, I might encour­age wean­ing, because I wouldn’t want to tan­dem nurse (nurse K & A) while preg­nant, but if that doesn’t hap­pen, we’ll con­tinue to go at his pace.