Managing my breastfeeding toddler while pregnant

[LittlLizard]

I have recently found out I’m pregnant (I’m only around 6 weeks) I have a 23 month old currently who still breast feeds for her nap and wakes multiple times a night for feeds.

I have a few worries and no one to talk them through with at the moment, so here goes.
how has everyone coped with the 1-2 transition with a similar age gap, I’m due October so dd will be around 2.7. She doesn’t attend nursery and I have no intention of sending her till she’s atleast 3 (personal choice) my partner works 6 days a week and we currently live away from friends and family so there is no village. Also struggling with tiredness and morning sickness already and my days alone with my toddler have been hard.

M second concern is that my dd is still night waking, she goes to bed in her own cot but always ends up co-sleeping by the end of the night, still wakes 3-4 times to feed over night, how likely is she to self wean as my milk changes in pregnancy. I have considered weaning but she’s up for hours crying if I say no and I’m already exhausted.

Just looking for some experiences, advice and solidarity!
thank you!

I would ween her off now. You will be more exhausted later.

Send her to nursery. You need a break!

Time to wean. Your body needs a break.

I

I have thought about it but we are looking for move before the new baby is here and the nurseries around where we currently live I dislike (admittedly I am fussy). I also have anxiety around leaving her, she currently hasn’t spent more that a few hours away from me, even with her dad.

I weaned when I was about 4.5 months pregnant and my toddler was just over 2. I found it worked well timing wise as my milk supply had dropped.

I planned it, talked about it, cut daytime feeds down lengthwise by only feeding while singing a song, read a book…. But tbh in the end I was touched out and having an aversion to feeding, and my husband’s dealt with her for the first night. All forgotten within a day or 2 and her night waking did reduce somewhat.

Personally I would have found having her with the newborn by myself really hard - we kept her in nursery 2 days a week and with grandparents 2 days a week. I actually feel like she coped so much better with the change of having a new sibling because she kept her routine away from them.

Thank you for this,
we have day weaned besides her nap and she rarely asks for it and accepts when I explain no more but nighttime’s it’s like there’s no reasoning with her 😅 I know it requires consistency but I find that hard at the moment when all I want to do is sleep. We are in a small flat so she’s in our bedroom making it hard to separate for her dad to deal with nighttime’s.

also I appreciate having their own routine helps but her current routine is spending her day with me, I worry all the change at once would make things worse.

So don’t change it all at once. But do start now. Drive the change a bit on this one. So the night before and after his day off he’ll have to go in and say mummy’s asleep would you like some water or whatever. Come up with a plan and stick with it.

And definitely look at nursery or other alternative for 1/2 a day a week working up to more. The age gap is going to be a pretty hard one. And you do seem
to be choosing to make it quite a lot harder.

It's a long time ago now, but I got pregnant with my youngest when my middle one was about 14 months old. DS1 did go to nursery as I was working full time but he was still breastfeeding regularly, including though the night. I did continue to breastfeed through pregnancy and then tandem fed for a couple of years but I night weaned DS1. To be honest, I can't remember exactly how I did it but if I recall rightly I used advice from a website by Dr Jay Gordon - not sure if that's still around.
All my DC are in their 20s now so my memories of babyhood are a bit hazy now but I think that night weaning made it all a lot more tolerable. I had HG in all my pregnancies and the first 2 or 3 months were particularly grim so I found breastfeeding at night was more than I could handle. It was easier to night wean DS1 than I thought it would be, possibly because it was less attractive to him as my milk supply dropped. I think if I had wanted to it would have probably been fairly easy to encourage him to stop completely. But once I was getting a bit of sleep I didn't mind continuing and he clearly wanted to. I think I remember reading that about 50% will self wean in their mother's next pregnancy but quite a lot more do so with a bit of encouragement.

I can relate to the exhaustion. If I were you I would look at night weaning and then see how you feel. There's nothing wrong with stopping now if that's what you want, and personally, if you don't want to tandem feed I would wean asap. I think it would be a lot harder to discourage an older sibling to stop one the new baby has arrived than after. If it's still available I'd recommend a book called Adventures in Tandem Nursing by Hilary Flowers. Despite the rather naff title (and my copy had some distinctly 60s hippy vibes...it might have been updated!) it does contain some really useful information about feeding in pregnancy, whether or not you plan to feed both afterwards.
Good luck whatever you decide,

Yeah you need to wean the toddler. They shouldn’t be waking multiple times a night for feeds. Sort it now!

You need to night wean. We did it at 15 months, by DH handling all night wakes and just giving water. She'll be a bit angry for 1-2 nights but she'll soon get the gist.

I think it's much kinder to do this now than when baby comes. Don't wait to introduce too many changes too close to when baby is here. You risk her associating any negative/hard changes with the baby and that will not be a good start at all.

I'm not sure it's great for their teeth to keep having milk in the night at this age either.

Firstly it may happen naturally. Mine self weaned suddenly one day around 10 weeks when the milk became less sweet, she disliked it. But this isn't the case for everyone.

Some people tandem feed both children (I imagine the older child only gets day feeds) so if you really want to keep the day feeds you could do that if you want to, but I think this should be a positive choice a mother makes when she's in circumstances she thinks she'll cope with it well. If this isn't you, ditch the day feeds too. Just tell LO that the milk is all gone.

Either way, the night feeds have to go. The easiest and long term the kindest way is cold turkey. Your DP books 4-5 days off work. You sleep in the living room, or kitchen floor, or whatever space you have. Your DP stays in the bedroom with your toddler and handles the nights alone, armed only with a cup of water. He hugs her, sings, soothes, offers water, but absolutely does not call you. He should be prepared for a first night with little sleep. At 6am or whatever you take over and give toddler breakfast and get on with the day while DP sleeps in. Next night repeat, and it should hopefully be a bit easier every night from now on.
I've done this twice with two voracious night feeders. DC1 slept through after three nights and DC2 took two nights.

I think you need counselling. This isn't healthy for anyone and is going to be really hard for her when the new baby takes all your attention if she hasn't been allowed to build a proper bond with dad

Hiding behind not wanting too many changes for her is just building a bigger issue down the line. You need to get her used to not being with you - it is pretty ridiculous at 2 years old that she’s not spent a day with her dad! You will be forced to make mask e changes when the new bag comes, and that will be much much harder for her than you introducing them now.
I agree with the PP that it sounds like you need counselling to work through your issues with being separated/trusting other people/letting her grow up.

She has a good bond with her dad it’s just that we do spend most of our free time all together, and I have no friends and family close by to have her for ‘the day’ she is great when she spends time independently with my mum and her aunties but we’re not in a position for this to be a regular thing. It’s more logistics that mean I haven’t left her for long periods of time. I am in counselling for other things though and I have mentioned my separation anxiety.

I have a 14 month old and am currently 17 weeks pregnant. My baby stopped breastfeeding on her own when I was about 12 weeks pregnant.

My experience is slightly different in that I had reduced breastfeeding to only before bedtime from when she was about 1yrs old.

I had planned to stop breastfeeding at 1yr (early Dec), but read that breastfeeding can help with morning sickness. So I continued with the night feeds. I didn’t realise at the time but she started to have smaller and smaller feeds before bed and was harder to keep interested in the boob from early Dec. By the start of Jan when I was 12 weeks, one evening she just completely refused the boob and that was it. Then I looked back and realised her interest had been reducing for a while.
I should say she has her dinner about 5.30 and was having the boob at 6.45/7ish. So I also don’t know if a more consistent dinner at that time also meant she was less hungry.

FWIW I don’t know if breastfeeding rescued morning sickness. I was definitely much less sick this time around, although still felt pretty rough and sick a bit. Who knows if it was the breastfeeding but I kept it up just in case.

Well, she’s going to have to spend time away from you when you have her sibling.

You need to night wean! I was up between 2-8 times every night without fail, and DD had to BF back to sleep. It got to a point where I broke down and said I couldn't do it. So my DH and I came up with a plan that night. We basically went cold turkey and she wasn't allowed any BF until at least 6am.

She was absolutely furious about this but by night 3 she slept through... we were gobsmacked! Even now she occasionally needs a feed once in a while overnight if she's unwell etc, but will generally self settle now. She's 13m!