Full disclosure

I left a comment on Leah's blog earlier today outing myself as the crazy hippie lady I really am, and thought in full frankness and in all honesty and to be up-front and a decent human being about it all, I should probably explain myself here. I'm not ashamed of it, but at the same time it's not something I go shouting from the rooftops unless I know exactly what sort of company I'm in.

I'm still nursing my son, who will turn four in April.

Yes, that means that he still partakes of his mother's milk, direct from the source, twice daily if not more often; rarely less.

I never intended to do this. My friend and I went to a local attachment-parenting meeting about weaning when our kids were about 10 months old, and there was a mother there who admitted she was still nursing (and co-sleeping with, but that's a different story) her almost-seven-year-old. (I think he was almost seven. I may have added a couple of years as time went by. Maybe he was almost five.) We were shocked. We, with our cute little babbling babies, were nothing like these crazy granola people with the clumpy German shoes. We just wanted to know what to expect as our little darlings naturally and voluntarily weaned themselves over the coming few months.

We are both still nursing our almost-four-year-olds. She's still co-sleeping with hers. I'm not, because I'm co-sleeping with my next one instead.

If I hadn't got pregnant again, I think he would have weaned the summer after he turned two. At least, if I had brought some pressure to bear, it would have happened. But as it was, since I found I could nurse while pregnant, I didn't want to traumatize my wee snowflake by weaning him at that point, and I certainly didn't want to turn him against his baby sister by weaning him once she arrived, so I was sort of stuck with it. By my second trimester I had cut down drastically to just twice a day, but after she was born it all went to heck in a handbasket and he was partaking at all hours. There I was, tandem nursing, just like I'd sworn I'd never do. You live and learn and then you eat your words with a nice chianti and some fava beans. Oh wait.

Anyway. We gradually cut back again and by the time the baby was a year old we were pretty much back to where we'd been before, at just morning and evening, and that's where we've stuck. He appears by my bed as soon as he wakes up demanding his "morn-side" (side is his word for it; his sister seems to be calling it "mumeet", which amuses me because whether it's mum-eat or mum-meat, it seems quite appropriate), and there's much whispered repositioning so he doesn't wake the baby as I long-sufferingly come up with the goods, under the rationale that at least it keeps us all lying down and quiet a little longer, and I don't have to open my eyes. And then after dinner, he must have his "bed-side" before I put his sister to bed and his dad puts him to bed.

It's not really worth the aggro enough to me to push it any further at this point, since I'm still nursing Miss anyway; and have you met my son? Well, probably not, but you've read about the Spider-Man thing, right? All three-year-olds are stubborn, but he's single-minded with the determination of a bulldog whose favourite rubber squeezy toy you're trying to throw away because it's old and smelly. I suspect that both kids will wean together, when Miss is two, maybe. I've told him plenty of times that most of his friends don't have side any more, and that maybe when he's four he'll stop, but he just laughs at my hilarious jape and tells me that he'll still be having side when he's a teenager, and when he's grown up, and when he's married to Helen.

Luckily, Helen tells her mother the same thing, so at least we'll all be crazy hippies together.

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Seriously, though , if you're looking for some good books on this subject, I recommend Mothering Your Nursing Toddler by Norma Jane Bumgarner and Adventures in Tandem Nursing by Hilary Flower. Both were very helpful in making me feel that I wasn't quite as peculiar as I felt, and that many mothers before me have done this and survived to tell the tale.