And I killed the supply

*This is heartbreaking for me and incredibly difficult for me to write about... but I feel like I should, so here I am.*

Earlier this week I got serious about weaning Brady. My Christopher and I are going on a trip after New Years and are leaving the kids with my wonderful parents. So that gave me a very definite deadline of when I would need to be done nursing Brady. I got such anxiety about it I actually toyed with the idea of moving our trip back a few months. But it didn't really make any sense. And would be way more expensive and complicated. So I had to suck it up and get myself okay with the fact that I was going to miss out on a few extra moths of nursing. There are few things in this world that I love as much as nursing. I cried a whole lot when I weaned Abigail. And she was over a year old. I would have kept going longer with her but there were other factors involved. It still ended up being a somewhat slow and leisurely process though and I didn't even record any of it. Just like how it pains me to write this right now. It's not very fun to write about hard things. 

Well Brady turns one on the 18th. And we will be spending Christmas in Atlanta this year. So I thought I should probably have him done by the time we leave for Atlanta. Although I have full intentions of nursing him on his birthday. As a gift to myself. Being only a month out, I got serious and for a few days, only nursed him once or twice a day (and not even full nursing.. Or nursing only on one side). It was uncomfortable for a day or two but then my body was fine. And Brady was doing just fine. I've been absolutely horrible about being consistent and giving him a sippy but luckily it hasn't phased him... He's taken a sippy great every time I've ever given it to him. And this week he's been awesome with it. He's totally fine with me weaning him. Occasionally he'll pull at my collar or something and I know he's kinda confused like "hey, I just woke up... Aren't you forgetting to feed me?!" But even that is infrequent. His wake time is so long (I've transitioned him to just one nap so that it coincides with Abigail's crib time and makes my life a little easier) that I normally nursed him before and after he woke up. So sometimes he seems to need to nurse before falling asleep but in that case, I take him to the brightly lit guest room and nurse him for second (sometimes literally seconds) and then take him back to his room, give him some sips of water and then he's good. The plus side to this whole situation is that I'm confident he'll do well for my mom while I'm gone. I think night feedings will be the trickiest part of this all but I'm not terribly worried (knock on wood) about that since everything so far is going better than anticipated. 

The downside?  I successfully killed my supply. It's there but not really. I wish I'd waited another week or two to do this. But I couldn't chance it if things didn't go smoothly. And I love and appreciate my mother too much for that. So hindsight is 20/20. But I know even if I waited til the very last minute, I'd still be this sad. At least now I have more time to emotionally prepare for things. 

I'm happy for Brady to be independent and graduate to the next stage of life. I'm excited for Chris to be an equal parent (sadly, a nursing baby really isn't going to consider his parents totally equal) to Brady. I'm excited to ummm... uhhhh... ehhh, okay that's all I've got. 

I'm really not excited at all. I'm just terribly, horribly sad. I haven't cried yet but I'm sure that will come soon enough. I'm still kinda in denial. 

But really I can only move forward on this. And for that reason, I would just like to magically be pregnant again so I can create another baby to nurse. I like my body just fine, but when my body is creating or feeding a baby?  That's as good as it gets. It doesn't get anymore special or powerful or spiritual or godly than that. I'm not ready to be ordinary again quite yet.