My Breastfeeding Story: The End

Since I started blogging almost a year ago, I’ve written about all the main stages of my breastfeeding story with Little Man:

• The First Hour
• Our Hospital Stay
• Coming Home
• The Breastfeeding Support Group
• The Low Points
• The Turning Point
• The Good Stuff

A reasonably complete account of our story – with one major gap. I’ve never written about the end of our breastfeeding story, when we weaned Little Man completely to formula and bottles. I think I’ve been putting it off, because I was never entirely happy with how we finished up. But since it’s National Breastfeeding Week, I think it’s time to stop putting it off, and just write it! Here goes!

Weaning to bottles

When I originally thought about breastfeeding my baby, I’m not sure how long I thought I’d continue for. I was trying to adopt a “try it and see” approach. I was hoping to breastfeed to at least six weeks. And I was thinking that ideally, I’d keep going to ten or eleven weeks, which would bring us up to Christmas and my brother’s wedding. Six weeks came and went, and we were still just getting started with breastfeeding! I told myself, I’d continue until ten weeks, and then wean Little Man onto formula. But when it came to it, at ten weeks, things had just gotten easy! And I had fought so long and hard to get breastfeeding established that it seemed silly to quit just when I was reaping the benefits. So we kept going!

At three months old, Little Man was sleeping through the night most nights, and feeding was easy and hassle free. Then at four months old, Little Man hit a sleep regression phase. I now know that sleep regression is common at four months old – but I didn’t know that then. I thought it was a problem with a solution, and Charlie and I nearly killed ourselves trying to find the solution that would allow us to get a full night’s sleep again.

A month passed, and we seemed to be moving backwards instead of forwards. We went from one feed between 7pm and 7am to three feeds. Hand on heart, we found those months dealing with that sleep regression far harder than the newborn stage. People – with the best of intentions I’m sure – kept telling us that “he shouldn’t need night feeds at his age” or offering us advice on how to “break the habit”. We tried it all – refusing feeds, offering water… Nothing worked.

And over and over, the same piece of advice kept coming through – “Switch him to formula – it’s heavier, he’ll sleep longer…” Looking back now, it’s easy to say that we should have known this wasn’t true. After all, from the time he was six weeks old, Little Man had been getting one formula feed at night, and he didn’t sleep any longer after that feed than he did after the nighttime breastfeeds. But we WANTED to believe that there was a solution. Plus, I reasoned with myself, I would be heading back to work in a couple of months, and it would be easier to have Little Man on formula feeds during the day when he started in creche.

So as well as his 11pm formula feed, I substituted Little Man’s 11am breastfeed with a formula feed. And then a few days later, when the engorgement subsided, I substituted his 3pm breastfeed with a formula feed. Another few days, and I substituted the 3am breastfeed with a formula feed. The broken sleep continued.

I started thinking that there wasn’t much point in weaning Little Man completely on to formula, because it wasn’t having any effect on his sleep, and in fact it was more work in the middle of the night for us because we now had to heat a bottle! I started talking about maintaining the 7am and 7am feeds as breastfeeds. It was so easy to bring Little Man into bed for his early morning feed, and I figured the 7pm feed would be a nice way of reconnecting in the evenings when I returned to work.

But what I didn’t yet realise when I started to make those plans was that switching the night feeds to formula feeds was starting to impact my milk supply. And…Little Man was quickly learning that it was a lot less work to get his milk from a bottle. He started to refuse breastfeeds unless I was engorged. Within a week or two, we were down to one feed a day. It became obvious to me that it wasn’t going to be possible to maintain the 7am and 7pm feeds like I had hoped.

I’ve read enough to know that it’s not impossible to bring a milk supply back up – but as Little Man headed for seven months, I just didn’t have the energy. We hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in months. I was more tired than I have ever been in my entire life. So I accepted that our breastfeeding journey was coming to an end, and I let Little Man set the pace for those last few feeds.

Gradually the time between feeds grew longer and longer, until 36 hours had passed since Little Man had breastfed. The night he turned seven months old, I fed him in the quiet and the dark in his room, knowing it was our last breastfeed together.

The next couple of weeks are a bit of a blur for me. We settled into our new routine washing and making bottles. And the night feeds continued. We tried again without success to get Little Man to drop at least one of those feeds, but as we would learn (just a few weeks later!) he wouldn’t drop those feeds until he was good and ready!

I was completely unprepared for the hormone surge that followed weaning. I don’t know if it was the combination of tiredness and hormones, but I was so emotional for the next few weeks. I remember meeting one of the girls from the Breastfeeding Group and telling her that Little Man was weaned onto formula, and I almost got upset telling her the story.

But that low feeling passed, and at eight months old, Little Man dropped first one night feed, and then a week or two later he dropped the other. It’s amazing how sleep changes your outlook. My energy returned, and I started to feel so much better. Charlie thought it was fantastic – he loved that he could feed Little Man as easily as I could. And as my energy returned, I also started to appreciate the freedom that bottles were giving us. Wearing normal bras again, not having to plan pumping sessions when I was out, knowing that if I was late back to the house, Little Man could still be fed. And when Little Man was nine months old, my parents came to babysit for a night, and Charlie and I had a night away in Belfast. Our first night away, alone, since Little Man was born.

So there you have it. Our journey was over. It didn’t end exactly as I thought it would. And although I breastfed for longer than I originally intended, it wasn’t as long as I eventually thought I would. But you know, if having a child has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t plan for everything! And sometimes you just have to go with the flow!