Shipwrecked

There's an A.A. Milne poem about a sailor who's shipwrecked, and can't decide what's the best thing to do first - make shelter, get water, find a companion - so in the end he just sits on the sand and does nothing until he's finally rescued. I keep thinking about him, because for far too long, in regards to Mabel, I have been that sailor.

I mean,

• I want to potty train her (again) but I'm sort of afraid to go there because I don't want her to best me again.
• I want to cut down on nursing during the day.
• I want to night-wean her so I can get some decent sleep.

I know I can't do all these things at once, because then they'll be doomed to failure, so instead I do nothing but rationalise my inactivity. Like this:

• I can't cut down on nursing during the day and at night at the same time. So I have to pick one. And it's easier to say no in the daytime, when we're busy and I have a modicum of willpower and I don't care if she yells. 

• On the other hand, sleep is more important to me, so I should start with the night-weaning. And anyway, in a while she'll stop napping and I won't have to nurse her down for nap, or give her comfort-boob when she wakes up, so that will take care of itself. 

• But if I can stop her nursing to sleep at night, then she might stop waking so much during the night because she'll learn to put herself back to sleep when she rouses, instead of sitting up and wondering where I and my boobs are. 

• And when she stops taking a nap during the day she'll be much more tired at bedtime and it will be easier to get her to sleep, so maybe I should stop trying until then. 

And then there's the sub-list of all the excuses for why it's so hard to night-wean her:

• The resources on this subject say things like "Use your finger to gently break the suction as the baby [hah] is dropping off to sleep" and "Gradually reduce the length of time you nurse before they go to sleep." So when she seems to be almost asleep, I warily press down on the boob and try to slip a finger into her mouth beside my nipple. She sucks harder. I push a little more. She clamps down on my finger with her teeth. Now I'm playing tug-of-war with a three-year-old, and I'm in a very vulerable position. This is not the way it's supposed to go. She removes my finger with a firm hand. I subside for a few minutes before I try again. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

• If I manage to win the battle and pull out before she's ready, she simply sits up and demands the other side. (She is convinced that there are three sides, at least when I'm lying down.) And she always has to latch on to the "big" side - that is, the one that's uppermost when I'm lying on my side, so it looks bigger. Then I have to heft her, still attached, over my body so that now she's on the breast nearest the mattress and we're both lying down again. As you might imagine, this gets tiring in the middle of the night when she just goes from one to the other. (But when you think about it, if you're switching sides with someone in bed, you either have to go under them or over them, and it's easier for the smaller, more awake, person to be the one going over. These are not considerations that come into your mind when you first discover how great it is that you can nurse your newborn lying down, believe me.) 

• So cutting down on the time of nursing hasn't worked for me yet. My latest tactic is bringing B back into the bedtime routine after stories and nursing - when he's had his "What did you do today?" chat with Dash and got him his ritual drink of water and said goodnight, he's going to come into Mabel and give her the same chat, or a song, or whatever she demands of him. And then he'll leave and say goodnight and she'll cry for me and I'll go in and say "Just five minutes of side, and then I'll stay with you till you fall alseep," and so far I haven't actually managed to keep to the five minutes part due to all the excuses outlined above, but maybe some day she'll get so used to having him as part of it that she'll forget to cry for me and just fall asleep on his shoulder. Riiiight.

I'm still sitting on the sand. I'll probably be here until she grows up and rescues me.