The Weaning Story

So unlike every other milestones so far, weaning our son from breastfeeding was freaking me out. 18 months and there was no sign of him self-weaning so I was left with no option but to do it myself, but HOW was the question haunting me. I read a lot of articles (as always), spoke to mommies who have been there but somehow I was not able to convince myself as to how I will go about it.

I still remember how it all started. The initial days when he was tiny and had no clue how to latch on, when my stitches were still sore, my husband woke up every hour to mix formula and feed him with a spoon, then it transformed to our me time where we cuddled and talked about so many things..that's when he listened to most of my confessions :) Hence stopping it abruptly without really telling him about it was something I could never imagine. I know he was just 19 months and it might anyway end with a few tantrums for the first couple of days but I felt guilty of it.

Every kid is different and a method that worked for me may not work for another kid but then as my friends were asking me how I put an end to it, here it goes:
Agu is one of those high spirited strong willed kids, who is very sure of what he wants and its nearly impossible to distract him during an outburst of tantrum. So what has worked best with him is to talk things out like where we are heading to when I take out his pram or if we want to dress him up we tell him we are going shopping, small things like keeping him informed has helped us deal with him way better. I reduced the feeding to nap times, i.e. twice a day. Most difficult to put an end to, was the night time feeding. So I fixed a date when I was going to stop feeding him and told him "we have two more weeks and then you are going to have moo moo milk" (cow is 'moo moo' for him). Everyday we kept reminding him with a count down and with so much excitement that even he started feeling it wasn't anything bad. So the first night after weaning was tough for both of us but i didnt want to give in so within 2 days there he was, listening to rhymes or stories and sleeping on my tummy!