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My Little Multiplier

You know how parents of a single child are sometimes scared that if they have another one, they won't be able to love their second child as much as they love their first?

Before I had my own kids, this bewildered me. I grew up in a big family and there was so much love, more than enough to go around. Love multiplies. That's just the way it is.

Then I had Camilla. While I still knew intellectually that "love multiplies" is true, and was sure that I would love any future children just as much as I loved her, I suddenly understood why parents struggle with this sentiment. It was so overwhelming, so all-encompassing, the way I felt about my first baby, my little girl. Even when I was pregnant with Blaise and looking forward to his birth, a tiny part of me wondered how I could possibly duplicate my love for Camilla.

Then he was born, and I realized that I couldn't. I don't love Blaise the same way I love Camilla. Not at all. They're different people. I was a different person when each of them was born. And yet, trying to quantify it is impossible. Unnecessary. I love them uniquely, and there is no "less" or "more" about it. There is only being fully, wholeheartedly owned by my precious children, for whom I would do anything and give anything without a moment's hesitation.

Love multiplies. It surely does.

Camilla is our high-needs girl and I will forever be grateful that God sent us her first. For her sake and for ours. We were newbies and she forced us to prove our commitment to doing this parenting thing, to sacrificing our own lives for hers, to taking it seriously and giving her what she needed even when it felt unreasonable, which it did very often in those early months. High-strung, sensitive, complicated Camilla did well with parents who were focused, and who (after years of waiting) were grateful for the chance to have a child at all, no matter how demanding.

My daughter is beautiful, intelligent, sweet, and precious to me. I will always be grateful to have her. She was our reward for our years of waiting and she was the best reward we possibly could have gotten.

But those first two years with her were tough. I'll admit it. And our reward for making it through them? I think it's this guy right here:

I loved being a mother from the very beginning. Threw my whole self into it, passionately. But this time around I think I'm enjoying it a lot more.

Blaise will be fourteen months old on the 19th. He's been walking for a couple weeks now, and he can get around, but he still lurches - rather like he's had too much to drink - which I know I am going to miss horribly when it's gone, so I'm kind of hoping he doesn't gain competency too quickly.

Here's a video we took before he was walking well. We really need to take another one now, but I'm glad we have this one.

I watch my baby walk (excuse me, lurch) around, clutching whatever toy is the moment's must-have item, and I'm shocked by how beautiful he is to me. The soft brown locks on his head, his round belly, his small toes gripping the floor. The quickly-disappearing (woe!) rolls on his thighs. Every single bit of him: perfect.

Camilla's lean three-year-old body, her sweet smile and bouncing blond curls, are perfect as well, but I admire them with a certain detachment. Blaise's perfection is closer to me, because he's still a baby. Sure, he walks like a toddler, and he seems old when he climbs onto my lap, pulls at my shirt and signs "please." But then he settles in to nurse, his breathing slowing as his hand bats gently against my chest, and he's suddenly a baby again. My baby.

Fourteen months ago he was living inside my body, and we haven't grown so much apart yet, this small person and I. I know, this time, how quickly it passes, so I cherish his sleepy head on my shoulder, his soft sucking sounds as he nurses, his warm body next to mine in the middle of the night.

This is a gift I feel I've been given this time around: the chance to honestly cherish those things. Of course I don't always do it, of course I have times of stress, but for the most part I grit my teeth much less and enjoy my sweet little guy much more. Part of it is the awareness of how much I have to be grateful for, but I think the rest of it is grace.

And love, of course.

My first twenty-seven months as a parent to my sweet, complicated little girl showed me my capacity for love and self-sacrifice.

My Blaisey is not complicated. He's gregarious. Intrepid. Voracious. Quick to flash his ten-toothed grin.

I knew I could love complicated but the past fourteen months have taught me that I can love uncomplicated too. Sometimes we have tough days, but for the most part I revel in life with my little dude. 

If we are blessed with more children I won't feel hesitant about whether I'll be able to love the new ones as well. Being the mother to my two completely different, equally lovable babies has proved to me by experience what I already knew by faith.

Love multiplies. Love grows. Love begets love.

This is what it looks like.

Nursing's Downside

NaBloPoMo necessitates a certain amount of Phoning it In here at the old blog, but today I am going to take it to new levels. This is a warning, so that you can jump ship now if you don't want to hear about the incredibly scintillating topics of:

Caffeine
My Baby's Sleep Habits
My Aching Head

See? I told you. It's hard to say which of those qualifies as Least Interesting, but they're all vying hard for the title.

Quickly (and only because I have to post SOMETHING here) I'll tie them all together for you:

About two weeks ago, after months drinking nothing but decaffeinated tea, I added a cup of regular tea back into my daily schedule. I'm super caffeine-sensitive and my kids appear to have inherited that from me, but blessing of blessings, this time the caffeine in my one cup of tea did not appear to be affecting Blaise's ability to take naps.

BUT. Out of the past nine nights, during five of them he's been awake for at least two hours at some point during the night. (He seems to prefer the 12-2am slot, with 3-5am coming in a close second.) And when I read this post of Jamie's in which she mentions the effects of residual caffeine on nighttime baby sleep, I had an AH HA moment.

And since Blaise was up from 12am to 3am last night, this morning I was almost dead and opted to have decaf for my morning cup of tea in order to hopefully avoid a recurrence tonight.

(If you're thinking that it is SO PAINFULLY IRONIC that when I most need caffeine, I can't have it: yes, I noticed that too.)

But apparently my caffeine-sensitivity is such that going cold-turkey from just one cup of tea, weak lame little tea which has, like, 1/3 as much caffeine as coffee, is enough to give me poundingly painful withdrawal headaches. Which I've had all day today, despite the fact that I'm popping ibuprofen like it's candy.

So, to summarize: I gave up caffeine (again) to try to get my baby to sleep better and I'm suffering because of it.

If that child does not sleep tonight, well. I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Growing, Eating, Growing

So my sister Tirienne has returned from a summer working as an au pair in Italy to live with us for the school year and attend the community college that is near our house. 

(Have you noticed that I've started gradually working my siblings' real names into my posts?  I used to call Tirienne "Katie" here - from St. Catherine of Siena who is her patroness - but since Miriel is now blogging under her real name, it seems silly.  So you get the real names now!)

We are so happy to be having Tirienne with us, especially because she is babysitting in exchange for room and board.  It's an awesome deal for all of us, and we're already enjoying taking some time to ourselves.

Although.  Blaise is now refusing to drink from a bottle.  Argh.  Camilla did the same thing; she never ate from a bottle after about six months old.  It's our own fault, I think, for not giving him one consistently.  We are going to try again but I fear the days of the bottle are past us.  Woe.

 

Fortunately, Blaise will be eating more solids soon.  We don't do the spoon-feeding thing but he's starting to really get into the bigger pieces of food that we give him to gnaw on.

(As an aside, does anyone have that article Moxie linked to ages ago about how children self-regulate by only being able to pick up pieces of food that are too big for them to choke on, and thus the most effective way to prevent choking is to let them feed themselves?  I really want to see that article again, but I can't find it.  I think it was Dutch or Danish or something.)

One thing that I have absolutely determined that I am not going to stress about with Blaise is the solid food thing.  Our pediatrician says kids don't really need anything but breastmilk in their first year so I never stressed about Camilla's eating habits until she was over twelve months, but when she was eighteen months and still getting most of her calories from breastmilk, it did stress me out a little.  But it was all wasted energy, because now she eats like a champion, and is very healthy. 

(One time Bryan took Camilla with him to pick up the rare treat of Chinese food and she stood with there the entire time they were in the restaurant saying, "But Daddy, I want sushi!")

(We don't give her raw fish, obviously.  But it really cracks me up to see my girl who won't touch a tomato downing California rolls like they're candy.  I mean, pretty red fruit: NO, seaweed: YES?  You really don't expect that from a two-year-old.)

Blaise certainly isn't wasting away without solids, that's for sure.  He'll be eight months old on Saturday and I can't believe what an incredibly big boy he's getting to be.

 

He and Matthew are the same size, which is weird because Matthew can walk around.  It's double-take-inducing to see big fat Blaise sitting there all babyish while Matthew is a toddler, yet actually weighs less.

Camilla is very sweet to her little brother.  She dotes on him and brings him toys to play with and I have never once seen her act out toward him or try to hurt him.  (He is not yet mobile and can't get into her stuff yet, though, so we'll see what happens then.)

I love these kids so much.

 

Camilla loves to hold Blaise on her lap and have me take a picture of them.  Sometimes it's frustrating when she asks and I'm in the middle of something else, but looking back at the pictures I've taken in the past eight months, I'm quite grateful for her requests.

The first time I held newborn Blaise and toddler Camilla together on my lap I thought, how strange that he'll probably be bigger than her some day.

But at this rate, I'm thinking that "some day" might actually be, like, next year.

Anticipating

On Friday I was singing to Camilla before her nap, and she kept asking for a song I didn't know. It wasn't just that she wanted a song I hadn't heard of; her request was actually unintelligible. "[Something] song!" she kept saying, and I went through my entire repertoire - from "Personal Penguin" to "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" - before she finally figured out that I didn't know [something] song and contented herself with some other favorites before finally falling asleep.

On Saturday Bryan said to me, "Has Billa asked you to sing her the lotion song yet?"

I was confused. "Uh, no... oh, wait! THAT'S what she was talking about yesterday! What the heck is the lotion song?"

He explained: recently when we were having to put some ointment on Camilla with each diaper change, we called the ointment "lotion" because Milla loves lotion. Every time Bryan had to do it, he sang her a song he'd made up, "Lotion on my bottom, feels so good to me, lotion on my bottom, for all the world to see!"

(Um, let's hope not on that last part.)

Upon request, he'd sing the song to her during their bedtime singing session, but the four lines got a little tedious, so he wanted to add to it. Now, Bryan is a brilliant programmer but he's not what you'd call musically (or lyrically) gifted, so he simply took the tune and words to "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean"... and substituted the word "lotion" for the word "Bonnie." Thus:

My lotion lies over the ocean,
My lotion lies over the sea...

Et cetera. The effect is rather ridiculous when sung (if you don't believe me, try it) but Camilla adores it.

In fact, last night right after Bryan and I came to bed, she woke in her bed next to ours and started fussing. (How old will she be before she stops fussing immediately upon waking?) Bryan leaned over to pat her. Still mostly asleep, she croaked, "Lotion song?" and two choruses later, she was out.

If you had told me five years ago that "my lotion lies over the ocean" could ever have a magical calming effect on a child, I'd have thought you were crazy. But here we are.

In other news, I'm twenty weeks pregnant today. We've got our big ultrasound on Wednesday, the one where we find out, God willing, that everything is as it should be and our baby appears healthy. I'm praying hard for those results.

It's also the ultrasound where we can find out the likely sex of the baby, and although we declined that information with Camilla, we've decided to go for it this time. Not knowing was kind of fun last time, but the giving-birth and meeting-our-baby experience was so life-changing in itself that I didn't feel like it needed that extra oomph of the baby's sex being a mystery. Plus, it'll be useful to know, just for practical purposes.

So on Wednesday, I'll let you know what we found out. In the meantime, enjoy this picture of our already-born no-longer-a-baby sitting by a sink.

Reverence at Not-Yet-Two

This morning at Mass, we toddled up to receive the Eucharist, Bryan holding Camilla's hand and me tagging along behind. When he was nearly to the head of the line, Bryan genuflected, as is the practice of most of the people in our parish.

Billa had been watching him, and as he stepped up to receive communion, she popped down onto one knee herself, then hopped back up to follow her daddy back to our seats. Bryan missed it, but the priest who was distributing the hosts and I greatly enjoyed her little act.

Afterward, I told Bryan what had happened.

"Oh," he said. "That explains why Father Ed was grinning at us like that."

Disciplinary Juggling

I'm writing about discipline (again! clearly I can't get off this topic) over at Faith & Family, and tangentially I started thinking about something that is sort of a Thing for me, and I wonder if other full-time stay-at-home parents have this same struggle.

I am a lot more permissive with Camilla than Bryan is. Not on issues of safety, of course, and I certainly don't let her get away with defiance or violence, but there are a lot of things that I let her do that he doesn't. For instance, if she asks, I'll often sit on the couch with her container of yogurt and feed it to her. Bryan would not do this. He makes her sit in her high chair. But I am really just too tired to make her sit in her high chair every single time, all day every day.

I try very hard to be consistent and Mean What I Say and follow-up on any disciplinary statements I make. I figure, though, that if I don't make a disciplinary statement in the first place, then I don't have the trouble of following through on it. I sort of figure that if I don't tell Camilla not to do something in the first place, then I haven't made whatever it is into an act of disobedience by forbidding it, and therefore she is not disobeying. (Like I said, obviously this does not apply to things she knows she's not allowed to do, like hitting or throwing her food on the floor.)

Bryan is much more in favor of the Perfect Behavior All the Time approach. But my thing about that is, there are 45 to 50 hours a week during which he's not around, and I am parenting solo. So if we jointly decide on the PBAtT approach, I am - by a conservative estimate - solely responsible for the Perfect Behavior during almost half of Milla's waking hours. It's too much, especially with pregnancy getting me down. So instead, we go with the Pretty Good Behavior approach, and I don't feel too crazed. Most days.

Does anyone else who is full-time stay-at-home parent with a full-time working spouse have this same difference in perspective? Have you had to do some adjusting? I really hope I'm not the only one who's ever said to my husband, "Oh, please don't tell her not to do that, because then I'll have to enforce it."

I'll Wait Until She's Grown to Collect My Award

A year and a half ago when I spent hours of every day pacing the floor trying to get infant Camilla to stop screaming when all I wanted was to sit down for a few minutes for the love of all that is holy, I thought about how happy I would be when the challenges of parenting became mostly mental and emotional rather than exclusively physical. I'm a cerebral person and I do well with mental and emotional challenges.

I was envisioning helping a preschooler learn to make friends, or a grade-schooler deal with homework frustration. I failed to consider the mental/emotional challenge that would come much sooner, and which is currently the biggest pain-in-my-neck part of parenting:

Discipline.

My parents were pretty awesome at the discipline game. For instance, every single time they took our family out for dinner, at least one fellow diner would remark on how well-behaved we children were. And yes, probably people had mentally lowered their standards when they saw the passel of us coming into the restaurant and were surprised that we behaved even passably, but still. We were well-behaved, and it can be credited to Mom and Dad.

In my mind, the thing that is most to my parents' credit is the fact that they made it clear to us that they disciplined us for our own good. I've known more than a few people whose parents communicated to them the message that it was important for them, the kids, to behave well publicly so that they, the parents, would look good. My parents were not like this. Yes, they wanted us to behave well in public because they wanted us to behave well everywhere, but disrespect and disobedience at home received the same response as disrespect and disobedience in public.

Like any kid, I was furious with my parents on many occasions for the penalties they enacted or the privileges they rescinded in response to my actions, but deep in my heart I always realized that they were right. More than that, I realized that I wouldn't really have wanted them to act differently, because without the motivation of their discipline I would have had the responsibility of molding my own character. As a mere kid, I was unsuited to do that. Stepping up and making sure it happened was one of the most loving things my parents ever did for me.

As a parent now myself, I really want to follow their example.

But what I didn't think about - I knew it, but hadn't consciously considered it - was the fact that discipline would have to start so early, before my child was rational or even functionally verbal. Camilla was only thirteen or fourteen months old when she started hitting us, dozens of times a day. We instituted a gentle response of holding her arms and counting to ten that managed to mostly eradicate the hitting fairly quickly, but during those days I was surprised at how exhausting it was to have to respond the same way every single time, so that she'd learn that the action always garnered the same reaction.

When I used to think about discipline I thought about discussing moral implications with my children, helping them to understand the meanings of their actions and become better, more loving people. But a toddler has no concept of those things. With a 20-month-old, laying the foundations of discipline involves the basic task of showing her that we mean what we say. And oh, is it ever exhausting. This morning we were playing outside and, moments after I'd told Milla that she HAD to wear her sun hat, she took it off and threw it across the lawn. I didn't want to put down my book and get up from my chair in the shade; I wanted to ignore what had happened. And for a moment I just sat there, but the inconsistency between what I'd said and what I was doing was dissonance shrieking in my head, so I heaved my lazy behind out of my chair and enforced my words. (Surprisingly, and unusually, Camilla did not respond by shrieking.)

I was kinda proud of myself afterward. That chair was comfortable, and the sprinkler had been watering my feet. Am I Super-Mom or what?

In all seriousness, I sometimes wonder if I'll actually enjoy parenting more as the physical challenges decrease (my. child. will. someday. sleep. through. the. night. repeat.) and the mental/emotional ones increase. Showing consistency with a pre-rational person is exhausting, to say the least. On the other hand, an older child will have more and better weapons for fighting back than our daughter's current technique of squealing and running in the other direction, a method that is far more amusing than effective.

This is all idle conjecture of course, and actually I find parenting in general to be far more fun and rewarding than it is difficult. I do, however, often take the easy way out: right now I'm waiting to see if Milla will eat the crackers she dumped on the floor behind my chair (what? as far as she knows, I haven't seen them) so that I can avoid the task of making her clean them up. Like I said, Super-Mom, that's me.

Can I Get an Amen?

I had my first troll this weekend.  I've had unsavory comments before: some unnecessarily vehement disagreement with my positions on issues, as well as a personal attack by a former boss who had the mistaken impression that he could achieve anonymity on the Internet.  But I don't really consider those trolls.  I know I play hardball when I express controversial opinions here, and people who are arguing about issues rather than attacking me personally can't be considered trolls, no matter how fierce they get.  As for the boss thing - which did unsettle me, but ultimately was a good lesson in relying on my instincts when I sense people are untrustworthy -  I don't think he could be considered a troll because I knew him in real life.

But this troll was a true troll.  She came; she squatted under my bridge where I couldn't see her face; she grumbled several nasty, pejorative things; she left.  Her entire purpose in visiting here was to spread meanness.  I imagine she left feeling better about herself, but she certainly didn't enrich her life or her soul in any way.

I deleted the comments when I found them.  I'm all for reasoned discourse and criticism, but I'm not interested in preserving nastiness for its own sake.  And honestly, although I certainly wasn't happy about the whole thing, I wasn't shedding tears over it either.  Her comments bugged me the way it might bug me if I found a rotten spot on an apple I was eating, the way any disorder in my world bugs me.  But they didn't reach me, didn't affect me on a deeper level.  It took me a while to figure out why, but I finally did.

I go to confession on a regular basis.  It's an excellent source of grace, it's humbling, and - most importantly in this case - it does a great job of keeping me in touch with my weak points.  I know where I fail on a day-to-day basis, and if the troll had known to attack me there, she could have done some damage.  If she'd known to call me out for being impatient, for having a sharp tongue, for the fact that my laundry is never done and my bathrooms are rarely clean, that would have hurt.  Instead, she called me a bad mother.

I have many, many failings.  But I am a darn good mother.  And this is not a case of my protesting too much because I have secret doubts.  Deep down, at the very core of my being, I am sure that I am a good mother.

I actually feel that knowing this is part of what makes me good at it.  I go with my instincts.  I don't doubt myself.  I trust Bryan as a father and believe wholeheartedly that the two of us together are the best possible parents for this beautiful little girl we're raising.

I credit my own parents for the confidence.  They themselves were natural, instinctive, confident parents who taught me that parenting is not a set of skills or a job in which one's performance is judged by the standards of "experts," but a relationship.  They taught me that being a good parent does not mean conforming to those "expert"-determined standards for feeding and clothing and teaching my child; it means putting my child before myself, understanding her, responding to her, loving her.

I'm a good parent because I do that every day.  Sometimes I consult data, and it influences me to do things like breastfeed and put my daughter in flexible-soled shoes and regulate her sugar intake, but doing those things does not make me a good parent.  I could do all those things perfectly and still be a horrible parent.  I'm a good parent because I love Camilla and do my honest-to-God best for her, day in and day out, and I know it's working because she is happy and thriving and loves me back.

Like I said, I'm fully aware of this, which is why the troll couldn't really hurt me.  But I still feel bugged by her and what her comment represents.

Mothers have this awful tendency - especially on the Internet, I've noticed - to tear other mothers down.  I think it's a product of our own insecurities.  We're convinced we don't measure up, so it makes us feel better to think that some other people, at least, are even worse than we are.  The whole thing makes mothers as a group incredibly vulnerable.  It makes us vulnerable to each other, and it makes us vulnerable to people like my troll, who came across my site, saw I had a child, and decided immediately that "you're a crappy mother" should be an effective way to pounce.

This is bad.  Now sure, it's human nature to be competitive and antagonistic (although a part of human nature that we should attempt to civilize, in my opinion), and certainly mothers have been criticizing each other through out all of human history.  But today's parenting culture makes attacking each other so. darn. easy.

There is a huge industry based on the practice of implying that parents are doing it wrong, then selling them something so they can do it right.  You can buy  a dizzying array of products designed to make your child healthier, safer, smarter, and happier than all the other children on the block.  Many of these products are valuable in themselves.  But the marketing behind them - the idea that your child has a God-given right to an organic diet and the safest car seat on the market and a collection of educational toys that will have him reading by age three - stinks. 

A child has a God-given right to his parents' unconditional love.  If that is present, then the parents truly have the child's best interests in mind and (assuming basic knowledge of safety and nutrition) can be trusted to make the series of decisions and compromises that constitute life in a world with limited resources.  A time-saving fast-food lunch, a budget-saving lower-end car seat, or a sanity-saving video do not a bad parent make.  It is the relationship between child and parent that matters.

But that is not what we hear in our culture.  What we hear is that the experts know what's best, and that we should toe the line. 

Setting aside the not-insignificant fact that much of the "expert" parenting information given over just the past hundred years has turned out to be wrong, the expert-driven approach is hugely problematic.  It impoverishes the relationship of parent and child by reducing parenting to a set of tasks to be performed, subject to external standards.  It has parents doubting ourselves to a truly unnatural degree, wondering whether we're doing it "right."  It has the potential to rob us of much of the joy of building a relationship of love with our children.  And it turns us into insecure people who are relieved to be able to point at the parenting "mistakes" of others, so we'll feel just a little bit better about ourselves.

I'm guilty of it too, absolutely.  It is true that I feel confident in my relationship with my daughter, but I am not without my moments of self-doubt.  More than one time I have looked at another mother and felt relieved that she was not measuring up in some way, because it took the (self-inflicted) pressure off me.  Many more times I have failed to compliment other mothers because... well, because it feels like a race, and how can I win if I'm taking time out to compliment the competition?

It's ridiculous.  It is so ridiculous that it deserves to be called many words that I will not use here, this being a family-friendly website and all.  But I will say this: I am opting out of the race, starting now.  Those few times I have let my better self win and have told another mother she's doing a wonderful job, I've seen the flash of gratitude in her eyes and known that she needs to hear those words just as much as I do.  I'm going to start fighting to let that better self win more often, actively fighting to become the person I want to be.  We parents are in this "expert"-driven parenting culture together, and the absolute best thing we can do for ourselves and for our children is to band together against it and keep on loving them in spite of it.  I think we can have a great time along the way.

"Bih-ba" means "Billa"

This is for Lindsay, who asked so nicely yesterday.  Happy Two Years as a Catholic, Lindsay!

The Tie Belongs to Her Cousin

Bring on the doldrums, because Christmas is officially over.  Epiphany happened this past weekend and now it is just plain old dull boring January.

I've always thought January is the most depressing month.  November (Thanksgiving, which I love) and December (Christmas, ditto) are over, but spring is still months away (here in Michigan, anyway).  Nothing happens in January except taking down the Christmas decorations and moping about the fact that it's either (a) gray and ugly outside, or (b) snowing yet again, can we not get a BREAK?

Yes, I am impossible to please, why do you ask?

My sister Rosie pointed out that January is depressing to me because I let it be depressing to me, and she is probably right.  With that in mind I told Bryan that we should try to brighten the month with activities, so we planned a weekend trip to DC two weeks from now.  This weekend I'm going shopping with my sister, sans toddler-clingsters, and next weekend we've got Bryan's work holiday party (they do it in January instead of December, how inspired is that?) which means a night to ourselves, praise heaven, and then it's our DC trip and then it will be February.  So hey!  Maybe January won't be as bad this year.

Today, though, I have to take down the tree and the other Christmas decorations, and I don't want to.  Why is it that a Christmas tree on December 9th is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but a Christmas tree on January 9th looks sad and glaringly wrong?  It's as if an enormous bedraggled pink cat were suddenly sitting in my living room.

Either I'm charmingly indulgent or just lazy and foolish, but this morning I've been letting Milla take the shatterproof ornaments off the tree and deposit them in a small plastic bin.  After more than a month of "No, Camilla, don't touch the tree!" this delights her as much as you'd imagine.  I think it might be a bad idea, undermining my discipline and all that, but heck.  I've already started letting her do it and if I renege now I'll be even more inconsistent than I already am. 

If I look hard enough, I can usually find an excuse for taking the path of least resistance.  Not that I'm proud of it.

Speaking of the path of least resistance (but not in a deriding way this time - the good old POLR is not always bad), I'm sort of intrigued to find that I've become an "extended" breastfeeder by default.  I planned before Milla was born to try my hardest to nurse her, and when it turned out to be amazingly easy for us, I set a goal of nursing for at least a year and didn't give it much more thought than that.  I've always been open to the idea of nursing a toddler, and the idea of child-led weaning makes sense to me. But I'd heard from some people that their children self-weaned before or around a year old, and I had no idea how I myself would feel about the way nursing was going at twelve months, so I figured there was no point in crossing the bridge before I came to it.

What I couldn't have predicted was that my child would not even come close to self-weaning (although I've since learned that the whole "self-weaning before a year" concept is sketchy anyway), and in fact would be a slow starter on solids and still be getting most of her nutrition from breast milk at a year, and that there would be no question of weaning her at that age unless we started giving her formula, which would be silly for us since it's more expensive and less convenient.  Fortunately, I found that at twelve months I was still loving nursing her.  I loved it even more after we night-weaned her (because loving nursing is not the same as loving waking up multiple times per night) and I didn't feel so stretched and could enjoy our nursing time.

Anyway, to make a long story short (ha!) I have a nursing toddler, and I have no idea when she will stop nursing.  Perhaps one of these days I'll start to get tired of it and will gradually encourage Milla to taper off the nursing.  Maybe she'll begin to eschew it of her own accord.   I don't know, and I'm not really concerned about it.  She's certainly not going to go off to college still nursing, and between now and then we'll find the right solution for us.

However, I am curious about something, and maybe those of you who have also done "extended" nursing can weigh in.  (Sorry about the quotation marks on "extended" - nursing a fourteen-month-old who only has six teeth doesn't seem to me that it should be out of the ordinary, and I have trouble accepting the fact that it is.)  When people started asking if you were "still" nursing - however politely or impolitely they did it - what did you say?  I can't decide whether to simply answer, "Yes," because it's none of their business, or to try to educate by talking about the WHO recommendation and the benefits of nursing a toddler.  Currently I alternate between the two options depending on the person I'm talking to; I like the idea of sharing information but I'm not sure how fruitful it would be in some cases.  If you nursed a toddler, how did you respond to the questions?  And how did people respond to your responses?

Also, since we're in information-collecting mode anyway, I'm curious about something else: teething and willingness to eat solids.  I've got this hypothesis that kids who teethe late (and Milla wasn't really late since she got her first tooth at seven months, but she's now almost fifteen months and only has six teeth) tend to be less willing to eat solids early and often than their many-teethed peers.  What think you?  What has your experience been?

As I've been writing this, Milla's been playing with a set of cards that we've designated "kid cards."  They're from a casino and have a hole punched through the deck, and she keeps taking a card and sticking her finger through the hold in the middle, then yelling for me to come rescue her from the evil card that is eating her hand.  Kids.  They're so darn helpless.

Good thing they are cute to make up for it.