Yesterday, I came to a sad realization when looking around Liam’s room. We rushed him into toddlerhood. It wasn’t intentional, exactly, but we did make conscious choices after his first birthday that I now see have cut his babyhood short. Here’s how:

1. Stopped nursing at 14 months

To many people, this might seem late to stop nursing, but I had always imagined I’d nurse Liam for closer to two years. When I hear about or see other moms of toddlers nursing their babies, I feel so sad that we don’t anymore. At first, I just wanted to stop pumping at a year. I was SO over it and counted down the days until I could pack up my pump for a long while. Then, we decided we wanted to start trying for baby number two, and I worried that the occasional nursing we were doing would interfere with those efforts, especially since it took us so long to conceive Liam. Couple that with an extremely painful clogged duct, and we ended up being completely done at just 14 months. I told myself we were both ready, but when I look back now, 5 months later, I see that it might have been too soon. I plan to nurse our next baby for longer, if I can.

2. Sleep trained (CIO)

This is also something we did later than many people do, but it still seemed rushed for us. It was also different for us because he had been sleeping through the night since he was 4.5 months old, so it wasn’t about middle of the night wakings, but just about the initial going to bed part. I got pregnant sooner than we had expected and we felt like we needed to start preparing Liam for not being the only little person in the house for us to care for. Since I stopped nursing, we had been rocking him to sleep each night, but suddenly, that stopped working. We decided to do the CIO method at around 16 months, checking on him every 15 minutes until he fell asleep. It was way harder than I thought it would be, and it took weeks for him to stop crying at bedtime. Naps were another struggle, as the nanny got into the habit of patting his back to sleep, but soon that stopped working also, so we had to do CIO for naps (just a few weeks ago, actually). Part of me feels like we didn’t have much of a choice in this area, unless we wanted to sleep in his room with him or bring him into our bed, but I think we might not have been so quick to do CIO had I not been pregnant. Now that we lost the pregnancy, sometimes I feel like we made him CIO for nothing.

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3. Rearranged the nursery

When we stopped rocking him to sleep, we decided to move the rocking chair out of his room and move our futon couch in. To make room, we had to take down the picture ledge bookshelves that were my very favorite part of the whole house, really. I was sad, but also excited to put them up in the new nursery as soon as we found out the gender and painted. Again, this is another area that I now feel like we did for nothing, since we are no longer working on a nursery. Liam still has all his books in his room and now we can all sit on the couch together to read, so there is something good about this change, but I feel like his nursery, which I loved so so much, is now a big boy room (I’ll post some pictures of the new arrangement soon) after only 16 months. We did hang a cool pull down map in there when we rearranged the furniture (amazing yard sale score), which is something I’ve always wanted to have for my kid’s room, but I would have been happy to wait a while longer.

These are all things I will probably do differently when we have another baby. I plan to savor the baby stage for as long as possible because now that I’m on the other side, I see it is such a precious and fleeting stage. However, I know all babies grow up and there’s nothing I can do to stop that.

If you’re wondering where we are in the TTC department, I’m on my second round of clomid now and we’re hoping we get our BFP very soon. I still think about our loss all the time (especially this week, for some reason), but it gets easier as more time passes and I hope that once we do get pregnant again (I’m certain it WILL happen at some point), we are able to enjoy the experience without worry and fear (or at least not too much of those things).

Do you feel like your child was rushed out of babyhood or were you able to stretch that stage out?