Baby Led Weaning

Boomer being the junior member of the blwing team turned one a couple of weeks after Babybear.  This coincided with stopping breastfeeding and moving on to cows milk, which she utterly loves.

I has always thought that I would feed her myself for the 1^st year and then switch over to cows milk gradually in the whole spirit if baby led weaning. Things happened a little more abruptly than I thought but I do think moving onto drinking and eating from breastfeeding are quite intertwined in our case – I will try and explain.

Just before Christmas I started to get rubbed raw bits on my nipples which were not healing and getting slightly infected. (Nice yes I know) Breastfeeding was pretty painful but we persisted as I thought things would decrease naturally (which the feeds were) so I would just persist until the nipples healed and we wound down the breastfeeding. This was the situation for a about two weeks but things just got steadily worse and when Boomer bit me four times on hogmanay.

I actually thought I was going to have to get my nipple sewed back on. On new years day I woke and decided that I would delay giving Boomer a feed until later to hep the healing, but later came and I couldn’t face it , and Boomer had been drinking cows milk all day and frankly didn’t seem that bothered.

So basically from then we’ve just stopped, she had been having cows milk for a while so to switch straight over I don’t think was really that hard on her. She doesn’t appear to want breastfed particularly and a snuggle and a drink seems to be an ok replacement.

This is why I think this was a natural conclusion, I think that my nipples were getting really damaged because Boomer had changed the way she breastfed because she was eating more. Whether her jaw muscles have changed or she has simply started to ‘forget’ how to suckle I don’t know. It wasn’t that she had more teeth she has had the same amount for the last few months. I really don’t think it was coincidence that these problems appeared around the time of her first birthday and that magically weaning point. I would be interesting the know if anybody else has noticed a similar change in feeding.

The main side effect of the sudden stop and not slow wind down is that my breasts have reached an engorged level only generally achieved through surgery and boy are they sore. It’s nearly a week and still the slightest knock is really painful. So If repeating the experience I would defiantly try and go for a controlled stop not an emergency one.