Fully Weaned!

Well folks, it's been about 5 days since I last breastfed Rosie. I think that means she's all done! Woohoo! One night at bedtime she didn't ask to nurse. We read books instead. I thought it might be a fluke, but the next night, same thing. And after all these months of being nursed to sleep, she's content to read some books, sing a goodnight song, and go into her crib to fall asleep. She amazes me.

I am so pleased that I was able to breastfeed her until my goal of one year. It means a lot to me, especially since things weren't perfect and we overcame some serious obstacles. My first 6 weeks were plagued with traumatized boobs, painful engorgement, and a nasty case of mastitis. Then at 6 months we hit a really rough patch and I lost just about all of my supply and had to work very hard to get it back. At 9 months I thought she was weaning, but it was just a patch of disinterest in nursing until she worked some things out (learning to crawl, starting cow's milk, becoming interested in the world....). But we kept going and here we are.

Weaning can be really hard for some people, and it is very difficult to go through if it needs to happen when one of the parties isn't ready. Rosie and I hit it right on the mark. With the pregnancy, nursing was becoming difficult for me. And for her, well she's growing up and ready to move on.

I'm so proud of her, and me! And I can't wait to meet our brand new baby, and go through it all again. No matter how many bumps in the road you hit, breastfeeding is one of the very best things you can do for your child. I could never in a million years express what our nursing relationship meant to me.

Cloth diapered kid!

No, we're not becoming tree-hugging hippies. We're still the same SUV driving, dual income, hired-help having, whole-bean coffee buying family. But you know something, disposable diapers are just gross. For the past year, I've smelled that nasty odor coming out of the disposable diaper pail one too many times. They make marks on Rosie's thighs. They stink (did I say that already?). And the chemicals they are made out of -- yuck! They are expensive. They are made from paper and they are scratchy. I hate the elastic too -- many times Rosie has gotten a baby-wedgie from the inner elastics in the diaper. Not to mention, it's a LOT of trash. Especially when you will have two in diapers! And of course, they don't come in cutie colors either!!!



Before Rosie was born, I seriously considered cloth diapering. But when we first started diapering, I thought she was going to go to day care. It's very hard to cloth diaper when your kid is in day care. Not impossible, but it takes time to launder, etc. So I bagged the idea. Once we got a nanny, I thought it would be too hard to switch. How wrong I was!

With a new baby coming and now that cloth diapering will be a breeze with a nanny's help, I decided I want to cloth dipe the new baby. Well you can't have one in cloth and one not, so I decided to make Rosie my experiment and give it a try. I ordered a few dipes, and gave it a whirl.

Both Leo and I LOVED cloth immediately! First off, the days of pins and prefolds are gone. Not that people don't use these, and they do work great, but there is a new generation of cloth diapers.



Above, Rosie is wearing Fuzzi Bunz. They close with snaps!! How genius is that?! They are lined with ultra-soft fleece to pull moisture away, and a super-absorbent micro-fiber insert placed in a pocket under the fleece soaks up the pee. The outside of the dipe is breathable waterproof polyurethane laminate (not plastic, pfft!). Today's fabrics are truly amazing.

Cloth diapering quickly becomes an obsession. I'm now trying out different diaper brands and types of fabrics. It's all so fun. They are so EASY to wash! Seriously, all you do is drop baby poo in the toilet (you don't have to rinse them, yuck!) and put your peepee & poopy diapers in a dry pail. Wash them up every 2 or 3 days and that's it. There's no soaking or rinsing, no fancy washing procedure, no stainfighting issues, and no stink. I wish I'd have known how easy this is before I spent a year using disposables!

And if you think about it, yes we now have to wash diapers, BUT, we don't have to go to the store for disposables, clean out the Diaper Champ, or take the dirty diaper bag downstairs to the trash. If you ask me, we're saving time. And yes, we will save money for sure.

Hi! Hot! Hat!

There's Rosie's vocabulary right there! Plus the occasional "mabama" or other made-up words she's got going (that we struggle to translate). Whenever she sees someone she knows, like Mom, Dad, Libby, Cino, random dogs (she thinks she knows all dogs personally and they are all her best friends)... She belts out a hearty HIIIIII!!!!! When she sees her daddy's hat, she says "HAT!" And she knows not to grab mom's coffee because it's "hot". In fact, after giving her a too-warm bite of oatmeal the other day, she opened her mouth, all full of cereal, and said "Hot!"