The Big One and Taking Away the Big Three (Bottle, Pacifier, Breast)

In a few short days, my Toph will be ONE!

(*reaches for a tissue)

I've been reading up on "one" and it turns out, Toph will officially be considered a toddler and no longer an  infant. That means there are a few baby things that needs to go, and all of them have to do with sucking.  You can imagine then, how I feel about the situation.  It sucks.  The book in question is this one:

At first, I would hang on to every last word in this book and obsess over everything it said.  It didn't help those baby blues at all and finally, hubs hid it.  Now, we use it as an occasional reference but that's it.  So now, I refer to this book and everything that is supposed to be taken from the baby at age one.

The pacifier:

Ah, I remember my naive days when I thought I would wean from that thing at four months.  Now, a year is approaching and we're nowhere closer to getting him off of it.  Sometimes I am racked with terrible guilt about that; but then I realize that while I might be going against baby literature, I am in no way breaking the law by letting him have a pacifier to soothe him.  We have set some ground rules to start the weaning process--only at bedtime and naps.  We'll take it away during naptime first, then tackle bedtime. Raise your hand if you're looking forward to that.

The bottle:

Please forgive the horrible quality; cell phone shot taken by the husband.

No one in this house will have a big problem with getting rid of the bottle; in fact, hubs and I are doing a happy dance because it means no more nightly cleaning, sanitizing and prepping of the bottles.  Toph never LOVED the bottle, but he realized it was a necessary part of survival when he started daycare.  He's already down to no bottles a day and doing just fine.  Moving on, he says.

Breastfeeding:

A good nursing session always conked him out.

This last one is the biggie.  No one wants to see this part of babyhood go away.  Toph loves it, I love it and Matt loves it (simply because it's his free time when I'm nursing).  And you know what?  I thought about it and again, no laws will be broken if I nurse past a year.  It's certainly not bad for him, he gets comfort from it and it's a huge part of our wake up routine and bedtime routine.  I now only breastfeed at night and in the morning and I no longer pump (hallelujah).  We'll probably stop completely by June or July, when we're not working and devote a lot of time to fully weaning him.  Until then, this part stays the same.

My baby is growing up and the big year mark seemed pretty traumatic in terms of things that must be taken away (I realize that's not how anyone put it but in my head that's how it is); as a mama, I'm just trying to make it as easy as possible on my boy.  That's my job.

Feeding My Baby

I looked up yesterday and realized that in 3 months, I will be going back to work.

This thought has the potential to niggle me in the back of my mind and make me sad, but I choose to enjoy every day with Toph to it's absolute fullest and to cherish these months that I'm home with him.

With that said, I'm not going to be with him 24/7 forever, and I need to start preparing us both.

Toph has a passion for nursing; he is still on about a three hour schedule, try as I might to make it longer in between feedings. I absolutely don't mind this; he is a very healthy boy and I love nursing him. However, if I let him nurse for every feeding every day until I go back to work, I'm pretty sure both of us would go into shock. For me, that means I would quit my job, our house would go into foreclosure and my husband would have to take up pizza delivery again. (When I worry, I really go there.) I plan on exclusively breast feeding until he is four months old and in all honesty, if I were staying at home with him, I would exclusively breast feed until six months. If I could reflect on any one parenting decision I've made in his two month life, it's my decision to breastfeed. Yes, it was a struggle the first two weeks (it hurt very bad), but now I love it; it's become an emotional thing for me. So, the thought of having to go back to work makes me incredibly sad, because he'll have to take a bottle. I know I've got to start getting him to practice that now, so a couple of days ago I made a bottle and realized...I don't know how to give a baby a bottle.

I fumbled through it though and Toph looked at me in a way that said, "Mama, you must have lost your mind." Needless to say, after a couple more minutes of trying to get him to take the bottle from me, we gave up and he nursed, the whole time saying, "You crazy lady, if you've got the goods you've got to give them up." In all honesty, I was totally fine with nursing him.

I read that it's pretty common for babies to not take a bottle from their moms, so I keep thinking I'm going to make a bottle for him and hubs will give it to him. However, I've been putting it off. I told myself that once Toph is two months old, that he would get one bottle a day and when he was three months old it would go to two, and then at four months it would go to three and once August hits, it would go to all his daytime feedings (excluding the 7am feeding). He's been a two month old for more than a week now and I have yet to give him a bottle. It makes me sad! I wish I could explain how I feel, but I really can't.

I decided to make the transition easier I would introduce rice cereal at four months for one feeding a day, gradually building it up to more, so that when six months hits, he'll be ready for more solids. So, we'll see how that goes, but I know I'm getting ahead of myself. The first step is to make that bottle, put it in hubs hands, walk out of the room and go spend some quality time with my breast pump, while my baby gets his nourishment from a bottle. Yes, there are tears in my eyes as I write that.

We'll see how it goes.