Urgent BF weaning strategy needed - back to work on 2/1/08, do I ignore or tackle now?

[Mummyofthreebeauties]

DS2 is now 7 months and loves BF so much that he refuses to take his milk any other way. We have tried lots of times and failed and on the odd occassion I have left him for the day he has just waited for me to come home .

However I return to work on 2nd Jan and will be working 4 days and do not want to express but keen to keep feeding morning and night, so which option/strategy should I take:

1. While lots of people are around over christmas should I take this chance to refuse access during the day and get him on a bottle/cup. The downside being he may be miserable and it could be stressful, ruining my last days off with him.

1. Wait until the 2nd when he has no option and let Daddy/then our new nanny deal with this. Downside being I will have leaky boobs at work which is not a good luck and it is a lot of pressure for them.

Sorry longer and rambling than I intended but I am finding this a real dilemna.

I'd go with option 1 if it were me. I cut down to 'bed and breakfast' bf over a couple of weeks, so as to avoid the sore leaky boobs. i gave dd bottles in the day as no one else was around- she didnt seem to fussed that it was me but not my boobs - she was 7 mo too. she had been used to a bottle with expressed milk or the odd bottle of formula though.

can yuo try swapping one feed at a time, over a few days?good luck.

Thanks that is really helpful. What if he refuses the bottle or cup (as he has on many occassions), should I just miss that feed and make him wait. He has a stubborn streak to him, I went to a wedding when he was 11 weeks old and he went 9 hours without any milk!

When DD started nursery she wouldn't have milk in a bottle or cup either. She would just have a sip then turn her nose up. She was fine on water and bits of food for the 6 hours at a time she was there, but she went mad until I fed her when i picked her up. Gradually though, the sips got bigger and bigger until she would happily drink a cup of milk. It didn't take too long.

I do remember feeding her more in the night but as long as you are still doing that then he wont starve.