Sunday, August 19, 2007

Round 1 Goes To Bear

Okay. The score at this point is Bear 1 Parents 0.

Not worried, though. We're the parents...we're going to have many many wins when Bear's a teenager and wants to do things. I'm practicing it now..."Because I'm the parent and because I said so!"

We've been trying for the past two months to ween Bear off nursing at night as his method to go to sleep. We put a crib in the room next to the bed and adjusted it so that his mattress was level with our's. After the first three weeks like that, we lowered the mattresses and I had the pleasure of putting him to sleep since he couldn't nurse off of me. It worked great that way for some time. He'd wake up and fuss, I'd rub his back and talk to him, and he'd go back to sleep. He would, of course, still nurse throughout the night at selected times b/c he still did need to eat, but not the point where he would have to be in bed with us.

In the past two weeks, he's resisted our efforts to the point where he wouldn't go back to sleep and would really have a fit if I didn't pull him out of the crib and hand him to Abbie in order to nurse or at least to let him lie on my stomach and chest to go to sleep.

The little bugger has both mine and Abbie's stubborn streaks, I'm afraid.

Abbie's friend, Jamie, told her that he's going to be more stubborn than us and to keep trying, although most children should be weened between 18 months and 2 years. Bear's only 15 months...not quite in the range where we can let the little bird leave the nest. So last night, I raised his bed back up and went back to the original method we had where his crib was his bed, but Abbie could nurse him as needed just by rolling over onto his mattress.

We'll ween him eventually. But he's not eating his solid foods as well as we'd like, and its a fight we've decided we would rather fight later on.

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