My Weaning Journey

Weaning Aaira off Nursing & Breast milk was such a mixed emotion! On one hand, I was happy to not wake up in the middle of the night for pumping, no engorgements, no leaking and just feeling like myself again, but there was also an anxiety of how is she going to do without Breast Milk? Is her immunity going to go down? Is she growing up too fast as she is ready to move to the next stage? And so much more! Its OKAY to feel all of this Mamas <3

The Most important thing here is to know that YOU & ONLY YOU know what’s best for you and your baby (with Doctor’s advice as needed of course)! I know they say that Breast milk is best for the baby & while it is true, formula fed babies grow up just fine!! In fact, Aaira started formula at 4.5 months of age, way before I was even thinking of weaning. I was an over supplier and when I got my period at 3 months postpartum, I noticed a drop in supply. While I could have done things to keep up the supply like take supplements or add oats etc. to my diet, I thought it was a good opportunity to introduce her to formula, especially because I was already back to work & it would help me to make the weaning process easier whenever I start, as she would already be accustomed to the formula.

Another thing to note here is that Aaira was introduced to bottles at 1 week old as I was pumping a lot more than what she was taking & it would help me to rest & sleep as others in the house could feed her. See my Breastfeeding Blog for detailed experience.

The first 1-2 months are all about figuring out your new life and a schedule is really formed sometime after the baby turns 2 months in most cases. I’ll talk about my experience from 3 months onwards as I started my weaning journey when she was around 6 months and she was completely weaned off by the of 9th month. I am not going to talk about quantities here because I’ve shared it in the past to be transparent and help Mamas but also realized that it makes some Moms worry if their kids are eating enough or not and it goes into comparison, which is something I obviously don’t want. I took a gradual approach for variety of reasons & here is how it went –

We didn’t calculate these percentages proactively and basically went with the flow. This was a mix of Natural (Baby-led) and Planned (Mom-led) weaning-

4.5 Months – Introduced Formula (20% Infant Formula, 80% Breast Milk) – She seemed to do well without any issues with formula. If a baby starts spitting up a lot more than normal or has stomach issues after introducing formula, consult your pediatrician. You can always mix a little bit of formula in breast milk but keep the quantity small to avoid Breast milk wastage in case the baby rejects.

5.5 Months- 40% Infant Formula, 60% Breast Milk (Also started Purées at this point but solids didn’t replace milk here)

6.5 months – 80% Infant Formula, 20% Breast Milk ( Started Baby led weaning along with some Purées but didn’t reduce milk consumption)

8 months – 90% Infant Formula, 10% Breast Milk

9 months- 100% Infant Formula

12 months- Introduced Whole milk along with Toddler Formula (She didn’t like whole milk at this point, so we had to switch to 100% Toddler formula). The goal here is also to reduce dependency on milk and have fuller meals. Sometimes they suggest to blend fresh fruits with whole milk or add maple syrup etc. but we didn’t want her to get used to the sweetness and didn’t take that approach.

14 months- We started mixing 70% formula with 30% whole milk and she seemed to be fine with it. She was also eating fuller meals and her milk consumption dropped by 40% here.

15 months- We decided to take the cold turkey method and stopped giving her Toddler formula altogether and switched 100% to whole milk. She did refuse it a couple of times but eventually accepted it. Her nutrition is primarily coming from solid foods now and milk is not the primary source anymore. She still takes whole milk before her afternoon nap and before bedtime & sometimes in the middle of the day as needed.

How Did we get there?

After I started work at around 3 months postpartum, I was only nursing Aaira once or twice & rest of it was pumping. I also had a freezer stack of Pumped Breast Milk but once she hit the growth spurt at around 4.5 months, it disappeared quickly 🙂 Here is what my pumping & nursing schedule looked like-

3 months – 4 months- 5 Pumping/Nursing sessions

7am/8am – Pumping Session 1

Noon/1pm – Pumping session 2

5pm – Nurse or Pumping session 3

9pm/10pm – Nurse or Pump session 4

3am – Pump session 5 (Aaira was sleeping through the night at this point)

4.5 months – 5.5 months – 4 Pumping/Nursing sessions -My goal was to drop one pump session and I was targeting the afternoon pump session. I reduced the pumping time by 2-4 minutes for each session but if you have clogged ducts or any other medical issue like mastitis, you might want to approach it differently. I increased the gap between pumping sessions slowly by 20-30 mins at once (say for a week), then increment to 30-40 mins (the following week and so on) and here is where I was at around 5.5 months.

8am/9am – Pumping Session 1

3pm – Pumping session 2 (Gradual increase in gap which also pushes the subsequent sessions out and your body gets the message to adjust the supply accordingly)

8pm/9pm – Nurse or Pump session 3

3am/4am – Nurse or Pump session 4 (Aaira hit a growth spurt and started waking up once for a feed in the middle of the night)

5.5-7.5 months – 3 Pumping/Nursing sessions -This was a longer Took the same approach of slowly increasing the gap. This time the goal was to drop the Middle of the night session. Also continued to decrease the pumping time by 2-3 minutes.

6am/7am – Pumping Session 1

4pm/5pm – Pumping session 2 (Gradual increase in gap which also pushes the subsequent sessions out, this was a hard one as I was moving to a gap of 8-9 hours and hence it took 2 months to adjust)

12am – Nurse or Pump session 3

7.5-9 Months – 1 Nurse session (No Pumping) – At this point, my body had adjusted a lot to reducing the supply and I was able to drop to one Nursing session and eventually

9am/10am – Just Nursed her enough to relieve myself. She was also less interested in being nursed at this time given that she was used to of the bottle by now. I didn’t want to pump as I really wanted to completely wean off by 10th month. If the baby doesn’t latch at this point, usually people recommend manual pumping with a hand pump just enough to relieve yourself.

9-10 months – Completely weaned off. Your body might still continue make milk but you don’t need to let it out. I weaned her off at 10 months & today at 15 months, I can still see some milk if I squeeze, so its totally normal and It doesn’t give me any discomfort.

Solids/Purées & Baby Led Weaning

We started solids (Purées) for Aaira when she was around 5 months as she was able to sit up on her own without support and showed interest when we would eat around her. We consulted her pediatrician and they recommended that we should not look at replacing milk but just have purées as an additional source of nutrition. I will do a detailed blog post on it as some point but including this information here at a high level. She was not ready for Baby-led weaning until about 7 months and your baby really leads you to it as the name suggests. More to come on this in a separate blog post. We took a mixed approach on purées and baby-led weaning and since the time she turned 12 months old, she feeds herself 95% of the times.

A lot of this wasn’t pre-planned. I read some of it online and started my own journey! Your body and your baby will lead your way. Throughout my journey I used some helpful breastfeeding products and they are all linked below-

Products

All of the below Products are linked Here

Nursing Pillow: My Brest Friend
Breast Pump: Spectra S2 (got it via my insurance)
Bottles: Dr. Brown & Nanobebe
Pouch pump, warmer & storage rack: Twist Kit from Target for Pumping
Nursing Pads (for leaking): Medela disposable & reusable pads
Nursing Cover: Amazon
Breast Milk Storage Pouches: Twist Pouches
Breast Therapy Packs: Lansinoh Breast Therapy
Nipple Butter: Earth Mama Nipple Butter
Nursing Bras: Highly recommend investing in hands free pumping bras linked above

I hope this was helpful and as always, please feel free to DM me on Instagram if you have any questions.