the big N

The Friday night blog and wine sip has become a favorite past-time of mine over the past sixteen months. While I talk a big game about Friday nights, I generally end up folding early, putting Pea to sleep, and surrendering to a night with my computer. So, here I am, another Friday. And tonight I have the big N on the brain.

N for nurse.

Or as Eliana would say, "Nurse? Nurse? No. No."

Being the little parrot that she is, the little pajarita, she's quite good at echoing what I say. And lately it's, "No, no," (when she pulls gently on my shirt and says, "nurse?"). We nurse at bedtime."

But let me back up. Homegirl has added quite an arsenal of new words to her wild vocab over the past few weeks. One of the most important being the verb, "nurse." It's kinda funny too because I never really said the word, "nurse" until recently. It just didn't seem too appropros to me given the fact that I had no idea she was listening and building up an insane bank of voabulary memory that she would then bust out on me at, say, fifteen months or so.

Hey mama amigas... homegirls and boys are listening.

Watch out!

So here we are.

I was telling everyone I would nurse her until our trip to Mexico, as I was sure the love juice would help us out on the plane and during our travels.

Truth: All she wanted to do on the plane was talk to the other passengers and cruise the aisles saying, "Hello" and "Hola" and "Bye-Bye" and "Ah-dios" (aka, Ah, god), to every fool she passed. Nursing was not nearly as exciting as all those sets of eyes, all those smiling faces.

Which brings us to the notion of weaning the lil honey.

TBQH (to quote my dear Sissy, "to be quite honest"), I really do think I would be one of those crazy hippie mamas if I wasn't self conscious about it or worried about the ramifications of trying to wean her at, say, four. I love nursing. We do it well. We don't do it often. In fact on Wednesday, she slept through her morning nurse and by the time she was awake, I was long gone for work. When it was time for her evening nurse, mama was back in the dance studio, and she didn't have the opportunity (we are on the two nurse a day plan at present). I was kinda reeling when I went to sleep realizing that it had been a good 36 hours or so since I'd nursed her.

But then she woke up in the night.
And boy was I ready with my shrunken totties to give her all I'd got.

It takes two to tango.

I seem to be a very willing partner.

Which brings us to the weaning weekend, which I really need to plan. I need to just go away. I need to rent a cabin somewhere, gather some homies, buy a couple of bottles of wine, and cut lose. She really isn't that interested in the boob anymore. Tonight she nursed for a total of maybe seven minutes. God knows I don't need to "bond" with her anymore. We are in this insane state of connection. We have inside jokes (ask her about her "hot breath" - that's some funny shit). We are totally linked in a gazillion ways. It's really just a letting go thing. On both our parts. And I guess I need to be the "bigger person" and spearhead the movement.

But it kinda kills me.