When a baby is born, it fills the heart of a mother with pure love and helps her understand what unconditional love truly means. Then comes the journey of breastfeeding where you realise just how amazing breast milk is and how easily it makes your baby’s eyelids heavy and puts them in deep slumber. How it helps to improve their immunity and makes them healthy, chubby and cute at the same time and we could go on with an endless list of the benefits attached to it.
After all the struggles, cracked nipples, let downs, post-partum pains, mental and emotional stress, you become an ace at mothering. The time flies by from 0 to 6 months and it’s time to introduce solids. Suddenly it’s 12 months and many mothers start getting unwanted advice from people family and friends to give up on the most treasured bond of breastfeeding between a mother and a child. Eventually, it’s weaning time but no one ever talks about how to wean and only talks about that you should eventually wean.
How to wean?
There are a few things I followed with both my boys, which helped me wean them off easily when I wanted to do it.
- Make sure you are ready to wean
- Make sure your baby is almost there and ready to do it without any emotional need and they can get through without breast milk.
- Make a log of when they feed. Offer them fruits and snacks and manage their time of sleeping and waking up accordingly.
- Start offering them only food during the day. When they are eating well during day time, then focus at night time weaning.
- Make sure they are getting the required calories during the day so that they do not wake up at night.
- Offer milk after dinner and also something else if they still want to snack and eat.
There are a few foods that help regulate better sleep, like:-
- Almonds contain high doses of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate the sleeping and waking cycle.
- Warm milk is a common home remedy for sleeplessness. Milk contains four sleep-promoting compounds: tryptophan, calcium, vitamin D, and melatonin.
- Walnuts contain a few compounds that promote and regulate sleep, including melatonin, serotonin, and magnesium.
Once a child is full at bedtime, they sleep peacefully through the night. You need to have patience and stick to routines and schedules even with the food you offer.
How did I know they were ready?
The boys started sleeping through the night till 8 in the morning and used to breastfeed very little and then go off to sleep and wake up at 9-9.30 am. I started patting them back to sleep, offering water or letting them wake up if nothing worked but didn’t start breastfeeding again and they self-weaned with my help at 22 months and 24 months without any fuss.
