Teresa solicited stories and reflections on children who were weaned before
age 2.5 or so.  I have posted on this before, but have thought about it a
lot since last time the topic was up.

My first, my daughter, was BF for 40 months and weaning happened at my
initiative.  The second, who was born two years after the first was weaned,
was BF for 15 months and I perceived him at the time to have weaned himself.
That was in 1988, and I don't think I would perceive it the same way today.

I was away from him for about 9-10 hours a day starting when he was just
over 8 months old.  Before that I had barely been in a separate room from
him, ever.  But I started midwifery school and had a longish commute.  (By
bus, so I did ALL the reading in transit, but that is another story!)  I was
the only one still BF in my class, though 5 other students also had children
around the same age.  He didn't show signs of distress with the major
changes my studying brought.  I was home full time for 6 months with my
daughter, and she simply shifted her BF pattern to compensate.

But he was so interested in other food from the moment he realized that we
were eating in his presence, that it just happened that breastfeeding became
less essential.  He wanted to try EVERYTHING we ate, and he loved every
single thing, including salt herring filets and ratatouille in crêpes when
he tasted them around the age of a year.  It's too late to report us for
nutritionally abusing him, and he now at nearly 15 eats like a child,
sloppily and with arbitrary and changing likes and dislikes, but as a baby
and toddler he *never* needed a bib.  If it was food, it was swallowed and
enjoyed.

Of my two children, he is also the one who has consistently been a cuddler,
who is happiest when everyone is at home together, and who still crawls into
bed to sleep with whoever is home alone if I or my husband are away on
business.  He now finds it too crowded for comfort for the most part if we
are both there, but he is also taller than I am.

Ted Greiner gave a talk on sustained BF at the Canadian 'BF Now' conference
in New Brunswick in May, and what struck me after hearing him was the
realization that my children, whose birth weights differed by one pound (7#
2 oz and 8# 2 oz or 3240 g and 3700 g) both had the same weight at weaning
despite their very different ages.  My son weighed over 17 pounds (8500 g)
when he started solids at five months, which was what my daughter weighed at
a year.  She grew very slowly over the next 3 years so she was not much over
20 pounds when she was fully weaned.  He weighed the same in less than half
the time.  She began solids at six months and was a skeptic for a long time,
preferring the breast to nearly everything else.  Not so with him.  He
savored the tastes, consistencies, and the handling of food, and seemed to
get a charge out of simply feeding himself with a spoon, and later with a
knife and fork.  Never used a bottle with any regularity, and not at all
after he was weaned from breast, though he did have a pacifier which was
used on car trips til he was nearly three months old, but then I tossed them
all out and he never went back to it.  Neither of them ever- EVER- sucked
their thumbs, never even had a real transitional object or a comfort habit,
and didn't have trouble falling asleep.  This alone makes me wonder whether
I am really their mother, as I was a thumbsucker til age 15, still have my
transitional object in my nightstand and I never sleep, as my posts at all
hours of the day and night will verify.

He was weaned after I adopted the 'don't offer, don't refuse' policy, though
I didn't call it that.  I just decided to wait and see when he would ask, as
I realized all the initiative to BF was coming from me, though he didn't
refuse when I offered.  But after three days when he didn't ask, I figured
he was done.  That is what I think would be different today.  In 1988, I
thought his BF course was 'the norm' and hers was 'unusual'.  Today I would
want to hang on to BF as long as I could, and I see weaning a pre-verbal
child as an unfortunate consequence of the way many of us live.  I have no
guilt about how it happened for us.  But I do regret it!

Rachel Myr
reminiscing as I wait for that baby to come home from the 'Quart' rock
festival in our town, where he was going to hear Wyclef Jean and Alanis
Morissette tonight.  Guess he really IS weaned now!
Kristiansand, Norway

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