{ 2007 01 23 }

He’s not hungry. Really.

I never really thought about the day to day reality of nursing for this long. While the initial, round-the-clock duties have lessened, nursing an older baby (well my older baby anyway) is much more of a commitment. Regardless of how much solid food he eats during the day he still nurses 5 or 6 times a day and 2 or 3 times at night. Now that he’s old enough to be interested in everything he can’t nurse in public- I have to take him into a dressing room or a car and even at home we have to go into a darkened room or else he’s just too damn distracted.

He used to eat calmly and quietly, now he’s a wildman while he eats especially when he wants to fall asleep. Instead of sweetly sucking he’s burrowing, flailing, kicking, pinching, and struggling to find a comfortable spot. It’s often painful and I have to say, “No, you’re hurting mommy,” and he stops and cries and I hold him still while he tries to fling himself off of my lap and it takes what feels like forever to get him calm enough to nurse again and eventually fall asleep.

I thought that by this point he’d be replacing at least some nursing sessions with solid foods, but the reality is that no matter how much he eats, and some days he eats quite a bit, he still wants to nurse afterwards and other days he doesn’t want to eat anything at all. All he wants is breastmilk.
The reality of it, the inconvenience and the struggle and the constantly being on duty, isn’t too hard to deal with. Since I’m just at home with him all day it’s just what I do, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I just hate that his grandmothers think I’m starving him. My mother stuffs his face the entire time she’s with him and gets irritated if I only bring him one type of snack while she babysits. My mother-in-law, who is the nicest woman in the world and would never say anything to me, is the same way. At parties she gives him crackers and he can’t get enough of them so she thinks it’s because he’s hungry. It’s not because he’s hungry, it’s because they are salty, and salt is something he doesn’t get much of at home. The other day she asked Boyfiend if the Fiendling was eating enough. She was concerned that we don’t have any jarred baby food in the house. I don’t understand why the jarred stuff is so much better than the real stuff. Why would I buy a jar of pears instead of giving him a pear to eat? He’s ten months old and has a ton of teeth. He’s fine with small pieces of food and doesn’t need purees anymore

I understand that breastfeeding and self feeding are things that are completely foreign to my mother and mother-in-law. Their experience was that babies got formula on a three to four hour schedule for a month and were expected to sleep through the night with no nighttime feedings by six weeks. As early as one month cereal was added to the bottle to help with sleeping through the night and pureed solids were started in earnest at four months with meats by six months. I’m sure by the time their babies were ten months old they were eating a full breakfast, lunch and dinner with snacks and desserts.

My mother is constantly saying things like, “Can I give him some steak?” or “can I buy him a lollipop while we’re out?” No and no. Boyfiend’s mother just worries about his health which is ridiculous because developmentally he’s hit almost all of the one year milestones which she should know since she works in a pediatrician’s office. He’s fine. Better than fine, which is why I’m not planning on weaning him yet. The one year milestone is quickly approaching and it would be lovely to wean him soon after, but the truth is that I probably won’t. I’m not even going to attempt to set a timetable yet, but I will say that these women are batshit crazy.

Posted by girlfiend on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007, at 9:46 am, and filed under Fiendling, food, motherhood.

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