Right around the birth of our first child, the World Health Organization put out a report that recommended breastfeeding children until the age of two, and exclusively for the first 6 months of life. My pharmacist friend was using the report as a benchmark for her family, as were many other mothers I was talking to. Up to this point, we hadn’t felt like mainstream parents, and I found comfort in the wide-spread acceptance of this information that was supporting attachment parenting concepts that we liked. We put any discomfort we or other family members felt aside about feeding in public and other issues, and decided to breastfeed our daughter for a minimum of one year. We were hopeful for, but not sure we’d make it to, two years.  How very intuitive of us. Regardless of our goal, we learned that breastfeeding was coming at the expense of sleep. Finding a good balance between caring for our children in an attached way, and getting quality sleep for every one in our family, is one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced so far.

After months of waking every two hours with my daughter, I got pregnant with my son. I was a barfer and would get crazy neck kinks from feeding in bed. I grew very impatient and cranky and needed to find ways to get more sleep, quickly. After responding to her every desire for 20 months, I had to find a way to teach her to self-soothe – and so began the journey of trying to teach my kids to have a strong self-esteem, but that is another story. My husband and I dabbled in letting her cry herself to sleep because it was supposed to be the most efficient, and therefore least harmful to my relationship with my daughter. It struck us as a bit odd thought that a lot of deep crying for four days was supposed to teach her how to sleep.  Like time-outs, it was too hard on our nervous systems and intuitively we weren’t comfortable ignoring the need of our baby for comfort. The book we were hearing about from a lot of parents was The No Cry Sleep Solution. So I photocopied the workbook and took notes every night and watched over about three months as we slowly worked at finding new soothing tools for our daughter while simultaneously weaning her, first of daytime, then night time feeds. I had a list of 14 ideas for helping soother my baby, and I was trying to find the magic solution. It took months of analysing to get her sleeping more through the night. Two days after fully weaning her, she slept through the night.

With my second child, at about 17 months, I saw that I was beginning to need more sleep again and that I was losing presence with those around me. Seeing the early signs of my need, I began to introduce pacifiers, bottles and stuffies a little earlier, before beginning to wean. Our son began to sleep through the night at 19 months, after he was fully weaned and it felt much more naturally acquired. I do have little pangs of guilt knowing I didn’t make it to two years with either of the kids. I’m trying to pump milk for another few months to give our son the physical health benefits, and hope I can get more than an ounce every couple of days, argh. I waited until I was weaning to start pumping. My bad. For replacement of the emotional support the kids had from breastfeeding, we make time for good quality cuddling – the entire family is well-versed in ‘hugs and smooches’ and we encourage lots of massage.

In the beginning I thought that I could breastfeed during the day only and have the kids sleep at night. I learned that with both of our children, it was full weaning that brought sleep back into our house. We do still play musical beds when our one-and-a-half year old is teething or our  almost-four year old wakes from a bad dream. I feel though that we found a good balance of caring for them in their tender ages, and caring for our needs too. Now we can count on a few good nights of sleep a week, which really helps us to be better with ourselves and each other.

Written By: Nicole LeBlanc Charlwood