Night-Weaning, part II

No matter how many times my son teaches me this lesson, I often repeat the same mistake over and over: there is very little sense in trying to get him to do something that he's not ready to do. I tried my best to night wean him when he was about a year old, but it didn't really stick. Eventually we fell back on our old habits of nursing at night, sometimes 2 or 3 times.

Finally, at almost 20 months, he appears to be night-weaning on his own (not that I haven't encouraged him a little). These days he usually waits until morning or sometimes nurses once during the night. I wish I could say that he isn't waking at all during the night, but often he does, and needs a little pat, a cuddle, a pacifier, or sometimes Tylenol to get back to bed. It doesn't help that he's had an ear infection and has been teething lately. I feel like it's one continuous bout of illnesses and/or teething. The poor guy only has 5 teeth and we're expecting 20 total, so we've got a ways to go!

Anyway, this all goes to show that the whole parenting thing is (once again) harder than I expected before I became a parent. But it's also so much more fun than I ever could have imagined. All I can say is that it's worth it!