Night Weaning and Losses
If you are a regular here, you probably read my post about our unexpected gift around Thanksgiving and maybe…just maybe you have been waiting for some type of update on how things have been progressing. Initially, I contemplated a creative way to share my journey with you all. I knew I didn’t want to vlog about it. I also didn’t really feel up to creating a post every week to chronicle the milestones and growth of the baby as well as my cravings and feelings I had experienced either. So honestly, I started to think that maybe I just want to create a series of pregnancy posts that would help others during their pregnancy. Not necessarily in any specific order, but as I was inspired to write and share. I still look forward to doing this. If you have gotten to know me a bit through my blogging, you are probably now understanding that it’s hard for me to make things all about me even though this is my blog. Perhaps it has to do with my core values where I’m always seeking to put others before me in my every day life. I don’t think my personality should emit anything different through my blogging.
Ok so since we found out we were expecting, I started experiencing a boat load of fatigue and all day sickness all at once. I can remember being sick last time with JR from weeks 7-14, but this queasiness is a bit different. I’m more tired this time around for sure. Chasing after JR on a daily basis might have something to do with that. We also started to night wean our little guy because we want to make sure that by the time the new baby is here, he is used to not breastfeeding at night and is sleeping in his own bed most of the time. I honestly love to still breastfeed and co-sleep with JR, but I realize that co-sleeping with a toddler and a newborn could be dangerous. Also, I know that my nights could be long with nursing a newborn. Knowing that a newborn’s primary nutrition is breast milk for the first year, I definitely don’t want JR to feel jealous because of my nightly nursing sessions with the baby. If he still wants to, I plan to tandem nurse my two nurslings for as long as JR wants to nurse. Night weaning may happen at the one year mark though with baby number 2. With all of my first trimester all day sickness and fatigue, night weaning a toddler right now has been even more of a struggle some nights. He’s been doing ok. I think overall he understands that after a particular hour he can’t nurse again until the sun comes up.
Another reason why it has been a bit difficult for me to create posts focused around pregnancy is because I have two blogger friends who have experienced miscarriages during their first trimester very recently. Call me crazy, but I guess I just felt like seeing posts about pregnancy when an experience like that is still new might take them back to thinking about their loss. Perhaps I was mourning their losses in my own way, too. I could imagine how I might feel if it happened to me, I could remember how it felt when it did happen to me. I have experienced the loss of a pregnancy in the past…one that I was forced to lose so maybe the feeling they had experienced was similar to what I felt…they wrote about their losses, but I knew that I could never really know so I just wanted to be sensitive to how they could feel if they read a post about a pregnancy that was progressing. I believe one day they both will be expecting again and when they both are, I hope that I still know them so that I can encourage and support them along their journey of growing life within them.
XoXo,