It’s… interesting. There are distinct advantages to it–I never have to worry about being painfully full, I can nurse them at the same time and Shanna doesn’t feel left out or fussy. I have a hard time sometimes with how pushy Shanna is getting. Her verbal abilities mean that she sounds super demanding in asking to nurse and I feel twitchy about that. I’m putting a lot of limits on how she gets to nurse. She has to sit very very still–no moving her head. She is not allowed to stroke, squeeze, pinch, or otherwise manipulate my breasts. She’s having an increasingly hard time keeping her teeth off my nipples and I think it is because the shape of her mouth is changing. She’s not biting her teeth are just pressing harder than I am thrilled about. I’ve read that at some point the mouth changes shape and it is harder for kids to latch properly. I’m wondering if we are already getting into that but I doubt it. I think it usually happens at a much older age.

I usually like it a lot when they are nursing together. Having them both nursing means that they are triggering let-down for one another and the milk comes out really fast and they are done quickly. They are starting to kind of cuddle together while nursing and I think that is likely to increase given how affectionate they are together. (Ok, mostly it is Shanna being affectionate at this point but Calli responds to her really well.) I think it has been a really good thing to nurse them together because Shanna is not showing any jealousy at all. She is completely thrilled by her baby sister. The closest she gets is telling Noah to hand Calli back to me so he can play rough with her when I am off doing something.

Shanna is approaching the supposed window of natural weaning. This is, of course, theoretical. Hypothetically children who are allowed to nurse at will for as long as they want/need will wean themselves sometime between 2.5ish and 4. Next month we hit 2.5. I can’t imagine Shanna wanting to wean soon. She nurses a lot still. It is, thankfully, down from what it was two months ago–I think she is only nursing 5ish times/day now as opposed to 6-10 times/day. It helps that each nursing session now results in a freakton of milk.

I’ve started pumping occasionally and I get 3 oz in as little as six minutes if a kid is nursing on the other side. If I’m pumping without kid assistance it takes almost fifteen minutes. I’m limiting my pumping to 3 oz at a time because I have to nurslings. 🙂 I have no interest in pushing my milk production much higher than it is. It’s hard to pump with both of them and I think my hopes of pumping enough to donate are evaporating. It’s just ‘one more thing’ and I can’t handle that. Pumping requires dedicated time to sit down and focus on something completely non-kid and it requires my hands and that doesn’t work well.

So yeah. I’m not sure how long I will handle this. I have so far been fairly committed to child lead weaning but I’m going to have to figure out how to talk Shanna into being more polite about it if I want to continue nursing without hating it. Right now she sometimes feels like she is seriously violating my personal space and that’s not ok. I’m not going to just ‘suck it up’ and deal with feeling violated while nursing. Not with a kid this old. It is still beneficial for her to get the milk but it is in no way mandatory for health. This has to work for both of us or it has to change. I’m going to work on changing it because she loves it so much and it does help my parenting a lot. It’s dramatic how quickly she can calm down, recenter, and generally get back to a good space with nursing. No matter how bad our day has been, no matter how upset, no matter how awful the tantrum… nursing can fix it. I think I am too lazy to want to give up that tool. So I need to work on making this work. 🙂