(Nearly) Ten Years!

Well, I think this is it! I think Mira has weaned. Much like her siblings it has been a very gradual and easy experience. She turned three recently and was usually nursing once a day, before bed. She started to not nurse before bed every night. Some nights she would want a back rub or a "rub back" and then would fall asleep before asking to nurse. This has gone on for a couple of months now. But she hasn't asked to nurse in over a week! She has done this before and then asked that night when I thought she was weaned, so I'm not 100% certain yet but she's definitely close.
I remember buying our house in Tacoma and a couple months later, I remember it being June and think that adds up correctly, finding out we were expecting. So it would exactly ten years ago this June. Thus began my journey of pregnancy, babies, nursing.... for TEN years! I was not expecting it to go on that long. We originally thought we would have one. One would be good and then we could scratch that itch and move on with our lives. I was just about to finish graduate school. Due to graduate a year from that June I found out I was pregnant, so we jumped the gun by a few months but some how I managed to pull off the last three months in the baby fog I was in and finish my last classes along with my final paper, which had to be given back to me to redo a few times...
I was to go back to work after a couple of years and get on with my life, being the feminist that I am, I never thought that I would be completely dependent on another person's income. But some time after Solomon was born we became a "family" and it didn't seem to matter any more. I had my job, Jon had his and we had ourselves a family. I found that I actually liked my job, preferred it to my past job. Then we both figured out we didn't want to stop with one, so we had Margo. Margo was a lovely baby- really very easy in comparison to Solomon. I don't want to make it sound like the first year of being a wife and a mother was easy, it was not. It was a rocky, rocky road. But we came out on the other side a family. And then we grew... and grew.
Now I find myself ten years later looking back. Ten years. Ten years of being pregnant and/or breastfeeding! Ten years! It's amazing. Much more amazing to me than being married for ten years. I'm not surprised at all by that. When Jon and I re-met and fell in love we both knew it was right and where we were supposed to be. Not that having a baby wasn't similar, it's just that I didn't expect to have three and to be nursing for so long!
When Solomon was a baby I remember visiting family and my niece very innocently asking me how long I planned on nursing. I hadn't really thought about it but when a year came there didn't seem any reason to wean him and he had no intention of weaning and then two came and still, every thing felt right and natural and I found myself becoming more of an advocate of breastfeeding and especially "extended" breastfeeding because nursing past a year isn't exactly widely socially accepted. Even though, it felt so normal and natural I couldn't imagine forcing him to stop. So we kept going. And I'm so glad we did. He got busier and busier and nursing became less and less important and right around his third birthday, much like Mira, he was only nursing before bed and not every night. He also wanted back rubs and he wanted Dada to lie down with him more and more and I had to be with baby Margo a lot at that time, so the gradual weaning happened so quiet and peacefully that we barely even noticed until one day I realized it had been a couple of weeks! And I asked him if he wanted to have a "weaning party" and we did! We invited a few friends over, friends who's kids also were "extended" nursers. And we celebrated the fact that he was so big he no longer needed "mamas". Or "more mamas" as he liked to call them.
With Margo it went much the same, so nursed until about a month before her third birthday. Then we had a end of summer camping trip and all slept in a tent together and she didn't ask to nurse before bed, so when we got home I asked her if she wanted to keep doing what we did in the tent, which was to hold hands and talk until she fell asleep and she said yes. And then a few days later she asked to nurse again, I said yes, she did briefly and that was that. She was done. I was early pregnant with Mira at that time and enjoyed a brief moment of being able to wear dresses with no boob access! And then Mira.... and almost identical story. She turned three the end of March, was nursing before bed and not really any other time, except on the rare occasion she would asked to nurse during the day, usually if she was tired or not feeling well. She's been nursing before bed but wants back rubs first, then often falls asleep and then doesn't ask to nurse the next day but will ask the next, and so on like this until now and it's been over a week and she's not asking or bringing it up... and I'm pretty sure she's done and then so is my ten year stint of being pregnant and/or breastfeeding. I can wear dresses again with no boob access, I can go buy some new bras that aren't breastfeeding bras! I can go on a diet... well, okay I already started that a little over a month ago since she was so infrequently nursing and I really needed to drop a few pounds. (explanation, I was a little worried to "diet" while nursing, don't exactly want my body to be "flushing" any toxins or anything while dieting). Maybe the dieting had something to do with her weaning, even though she was already heading in that direction but maybe the calorie counting/ cutting impacted my supply? I can't really say, but it was time. She's three and I don't put numbers before her and her needs but she was ready, is ready and so am I. Time to move on to our next big adventure. Still, WOW! Almost an entire DECADE of pregnancy/babies/breastfeeding... who would have guessed. : O