Pregnant, losing supply, and hungry toddler at night

[JMJ]

DD is almost 2.5.  Her pediatrician has been telling me since she was 4 months old that she should be able to go all night without eating.  I could tell that she was nursing because she was hungry, not just out of habit.

Fast forward 2 more years, and DD is still nursing out of hunger at night.  I feed her a high protein/fat 300 calorie "snack" before bed every night, and she sleeps for 4-6 hours, and then she starts waking up.  (If I skip the snack, she wants to nurse all night and never let me go, so I know it's about the food.)  The first time she nurses, I have a significant amount of milk, and she'll drink it and go back to sleep for an hour or an hour and a half.  After that, I don't have much milk at all, and she wants to just nurse and nurse.

I keep water by the bed to keep her hydrated, and sometimes that helps some, and when it gets to the point that I am in pain due to her sucking and sucking at my dry breasts, and she's still not going back to sleep because she hasn't gotten enough, I explain to her that the breasts need a break so that they can make more milk, and she accepts that.... for 5 or 10 minutes.  Sometimes, she'll let me rub her back to sleep after a drink of water, but most times, she just lays there, trying to sleep, and then scoots herself back to my breast level and asks for a little more milk.  Often, it takes an hour or more to get her back to sleep, and that lasts only a short time.

I'm trying to figure out how to meet her needs.  I keep hoping that she is going to just get used to the fact that this is the way it is, and nursing all night is not going to help.  I'm growing another baby, and I need more than 4-6 hours of sleep.  It seems more likely, though, that it will get worse before it gets better.  My second trimester is just around the corner, and I can't imagine that my milk supply isn't going to get worse.

Any insights welcome!

[Marissamom]

how's her food intake during the rest of the day? for us it works best to offer lots of snacks so that all of DD's Caloric needs are met during the day and she has the stores to make it through the night. 

[Bokonon]

I wake up hungry in the middle of the night sometimes too.  If I had my favorite comfort food available every time I woke up hungry, I'd probably not be discouraged from waking to eat.  ;)

My point is that it's not at all unusual for a person to be hungry in the middle of the night.  At 2.5 years old, she can certainly make it through the night without a meal (at 4 months old, no.  2.5 years, definitely).  It may take several days or even weeks to get her out of the habit of nursing at night, but night weaning is definitely possible at that age.  She will just make up for any lost calories during the day.

There are some tips on gently nightweaning a toddler in this link:

http://www.kellymom.com/bf/weaning/weaning-night.html

[JMJ]

Marissamom, I'll try to keep that in mind more.  I'm sure she's not getting as many calories from me during the day, either, and with my morning sickness, I have not been wanting to eat much.  It seems like she's asking for food all the time, but then meals sit out for a couple hours while she picks at them.  It's hard to tell when she's hungry or full, if she's not eating because she doesn't like the food, or if she's asking for something just because she likes it better.  She'd pick at a plate of food that is something that she eats and enjoys regularly, see some fruit, ask for it, and eat handful after handful of blueberries if I let her.  So, is she hungry or not?

Bokonon, thanks for the tips.  I'm not trying, per se, to night wean her yet, and our issue is not really that her favorite snack is always there.  It's that it's not.  I don't mind her rolling over for a snack a few times a night if she is satisfied and goes right back to sleep.  What bothers me is her wanting to spend hours sucking at my dry breasts and staying awake because she is not satisfied.  This has been going on for several weeks already, and DD is just persistent, as she is with all things.  Thanks for the encouragement that it will eventually work out, that she'll eventually get used to it, and the reminder that she is big enough for this.

[GoGoGirl]

Can you just give her some food at night, maybe for that second wake up?  I have a friend who lost her milk in pregnancy, and in the middle of the night, her 2 year old would wake up and eat applesauce or a banana.  You could also do a caloric drink, like some kind of milk.

I'm pregnant too, and lost all my milk in the first trimester.  DD doesn't seem hungry at night, but she's always liked latching on every hour or so all night for comfort.  Once I lost my milk, it was just too painful for me, and I couldn't sleep through it at all.  I stuck it out as long as I could (maybe another 5 months or so) but eventually I decided we just had to nightwean so I could get enough sleep.  Nightweaning ended up going really smoothly for us, and now DD just wakes up, drinks some water, and goes back to sleep.  I definitely have to be sure to cram a ton of fat and calories into her before bed though.  We've learned that if we feed her one of those full fat Greek yogurts in the bathtub before bed, she'll eat much more than if we try to feed her at the table at dinnertime. 

[JMJ]

Originally Posted by GoGoGirl 

Can you just give her some food at night, maybe for that second wake up?  I have a friend who lost her milk in pregnancy, and in the middle of the night, her 2 year old would wake up and eat applesauce or a banana.  You could also do a caloric drink, like some kind of milk.

I'm really resisting this for a lot of reasons.  First of all, she has early childhood tooth decay that we are fighting really hard.  I am OK with her drinking breast milk that never touches her teeth, but if I fed her something else, I would have to turn on the lights and brush her teeth afterward.  Turning on lights really upsets my ability to go back to sleep, and I really don't want to make her ECC worse or get her used to eating a snack in the middle of the night every night.  I'm afraid of how long that could go on.

Last night was better.  She nursed at 2, at 5:45 (while DH was getting ready for work), and when we both got up at 8.  She woke a couple other times but let me settle her back to sleep quickly with a drink of water and a backrub.  It doesn't make any sense, though, because she didn't eat as much yesterday.  I tried feeding her lunch twice (before and after nap), and she didn't eat much either time.  Her dinner was only slightly bigger then normal, and I added some popcorn and coconut oil to her late evening snack since we didn't have any leftovers from dinner because she had eaten it.  I guess there were more concentrated calories in the evening, but less for the rest of the day.  One good night makes me feel like everything's working until I remember that one good night is usually followed by another week of rough nights.