Weaning

Soo....it's about that time of Matt's life to be weaned! To get the record straight, I think that each kid has their own weaning timeline, and some are ready at a year like the experts want, and some aren't ready until much later. A parent shouldn't force the kid to be weaned until they are ready. In Matt's case, he had been off night feedings for a while, for about 5 months, and has been down to about one bottle a day for a month. Since the almighty experts say a baby should be weaned at a year, we are starting to make it official since he is doing it himself. So we have started going days without it and he hardly misses it. Sometimes he gets fussy around those times (after his morning nap and in mid-afternoon), but if he gets a cup of milk and a snack he is fine. I thought everything was going well!
Until night fell....

Now, even though we take great pains to feed him a lot (which isn't hard because he is a little piggy), give him lots of milk and other fluids, and lots of attention and cuddle time during the day (which he hates), now he is starting to wake up at night and scream and cry and throw a huge fit for hours and hours on end. We try EVERYTHING short of giving him a bottle, but that's all he wants! But he is not getting any more at night because we don't need his "I'm hungry" clock to start going off regularly at midnight. Not sure what to do!
So I have come up with a plan. And since I need help, I turned to the most respected name in the business, Weaning Anonymous.

THE 12 SUGGESTED STEPS OF WEANING ANONYMOUS

1. We admit we are powerless over our addiction to the bottle--that our lives have become unmanagable.
2. Come to believe a power greater than us can restore us to sanity
3. Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Weaning Anon...hey! Not sure if that's right...
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of all the bottles.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another mom the exact nature of our feeding schedule
6. Are entirely ready to have Him remove all of these luxuries of sleep
7. Humbly ask Him for 5 more minutes of sleep
8. Make a list of all times we gave in, and become willing to make amends to them all.
9. Make direct amends to Him whenever possible, except when to do so would lead to the bottle.
10. Continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly swear it's the last time.
11. Seek through prayer and sleep to improve our conscious contact with Him, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will and forgetfulness that He ever drank from one.
12. Having had less awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to other bottle users, and to practice these principles in all our children.


Hope that helps! Otherwise, things have been good. Work isn't as slow as I thought it would be, and the apartment looks much nicer all rearranged. Now I am going to go relax and get ready for another Hard Days Night....