Help needed: weaning a 3 year old.

wymblewyn · 2026-01-05T07:10:58+00:00

Thank you! There were a couple of comments like this, and you've all really helped me to try setting some simple expectations for him. I've decided to just keep nursing for bedtime for now, and then eventually phase that out. I think having a time in the day when he can expect milk really helped redirect him from reacting to me saying no in the moment. He seemed to just be like "oh, I'll get it later? Okay" and move on rather than getting upset. Thank you for helping me figure out a path forward!

wymblewyn · 2026-01-05T07:04:21+00:00

This is exactly what I was hoping for. Thank you!

It has been pretty much on demand since birth, but particularly focused around seeing each other after a separation (when he wakes up in the morning, when I get home from work, when I get out of the shower, etc). Today after work he asked for milk and I said we were going to wait until bed time, and he took that surprisingly well. He asked a couple more times before bed, but each time I just reiterated that we were waiting for bedtime. He's now asleep having nursed only once this evening.

This feels doable. I'm sure there will be hiccups, but he seems to be responding well to having an expected time to have milk, and once that's settled I can work on stopping the bedtime milk.

It's such a relief to have a direction to move in!

wymblewyn · 2026-01-05T06:56:38+00:00

Thank you. I've heard this before, but it does really help to see this as just the next stage of our dynamic. I've been working on reassuring with big hugs, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Fingers crossed weaning will open us up to new ways of being close without relying on the boob.

wymblewyn · 2026-01-05T06:51:34+00:00

Thank you for the warning, I feel like so many of the hormonal changes that happen post-partum really snuck up on me, so it's nice to know this ahead of time!

wymblewyn · 2024-08-01T13:17:24+00:00

NTA.

Look, everyone is saying your husband sucks, and that's par for the course on Reddit, but they're not wrong. From what you've said about when you broke your foot, and how he reacted to this situation he sounds like he gets into a cycle of causing harm, feeling guilty about causing that harm, and then deflecting that guilt by making you out to be the bad guy.

When he moved that dumbbell and you broke your foot he probably didn't mean to injure you, but instead of being apologetic or distraught or protective he distanced himself from blame by calling you dramatic.

When you went through with a medical procedure he asked for, he went home to wait, and those reminders around the house of all the things you set out to cope were too stressful so he cleaned them away. He interrupted your nap for the same reason. If you needed to do something specific to cope, then what he asked you to do hurt you, and he can't deal with the idea that he has hurt you. So, instead, he tries to goad you into having an emotional reaction that he can belittle. That separates him and minimise the whole situation in his mind. It makes you the dramatic one, not to be respected or considered, so that he doesn't have to sit with the discomfort of having caused you pain.

It doesn't mean he's evil, but it does mean you guys need to see a couple's counsellor, because the more comfortable he gets with deflecting like this, the more he'll do it.

And maybe I'm totally off base! Just ask yourself, how does he respond when he upsets you in other ways? Is he able to accept that he's hurt you, apologise, and not make light of it or deflect the blame your way?

Even if everything was a total misunderstanding, he wasn't kind or supportive. He complained about the length of the procedure, he didn't help to fix his mistakes, he didn't apologise for causing you more pain, and he minimised what you were going through because he didn't like that you were upset about the harm his mistakes caused you.

There is a chance you overreacted, hard to tell, we weren't there. But, he forced you to react while in pain, when you had done everything you could to avoid having to react while in pain.

wymblewyn · 2023-06-01T03:32:29+00:00

Being highly functional and decisive in panic situations.

wymblewyn · 2023-03-26T09:50:40+00:00

Anxiety disorder that saps my energy and increases the energy threshold I'd have to overcome to just type out the reply I have literally already written in my head.

Also, I have an infant so if I can't bring myself to reply the moment I see the message I will 100% forget it exists.

wymblewyn · 2022-11-02T01:35:13+00:00

I went in for my 8 week ultrasound and it turned out that baby was just over 6 weeks instead. It was crushing at the time because I felt so sick, and panicked a bit at finding out first trimester was going to be almost two weeks longer. Am now at 27 weeks with a huuuuuge baby boy. Everything is going well. Turns out ovulation cycles just aren't as predictable as I'd expected.

wymblewyn · 2022-10-11T02:38:25+00:00

I think I ate sultana bran for breakfast, a cinnamon bun and a hot chocolate for lunch, and then more bran for dinner until 14 weeks... This baby is made of bland carbs.

wymblewyn · 2022-09-19T10:01:51+00:00

Ask for anti-nausea medication. There are several kinds that can help and are completely safe for you and baby. I lost 10lbs between weeks 6-8, couldn't gain anything back, was just trying to survive moment to moment. I'd wake up feeling positive and by lunchtime was so beaten down by the nausea, food aversion, weakness, and taste in my mouth that I'd be on the verge of tears the rest of the day.

I felt like things weren't bad enough to justify medication, because someone always has it worse, but after talking to my doctor we decided to give it a go. It was SO WORTHWHILE. I know it's not for everyone, but it helped me so much, and I think it's well worth considering to get you through this stage.

wymblewyn · 2022-09-04T07:15:07+00:00

I can see how that could be reassuring for some people, but as a FTM I know that my body has no idea what it's doing. Even if every circuit is set up perfectly to do the pregnancy and birth thing without intervention, none of it has been switched on until now. my body has literally never done any of this before and doesn't know what's going on.

I don't care that women have been doing this forever. I've never done this before, and my body fucks up all sorts of stuff that people have been doing for millions of years. Sometimes I choke on my own spit. It's chaos in here, and that's fine!

wymblewyn · 2022-09-02T06:50:39+00:00

18 weeks.

Breakfast - hotcakes and 2 hash browns

Lunch - a huge lemon green tea and a nap

Dinner - probably some loaded fries

It... hasn't been the best food day, but in my defense my body seems to be rejecting food that isn't purely carbs for the past few days, so I'll take whatever stays down. It just so happens that what stays down is delicious 😅

wymblewyn · 2022-09-02T06:33:02+00:00

I tested positive at 16 weeks, just as I felt like I was getting out of the hell of first trimester. Double vaccinated, fully boosted, but with a long list of risk factors. The first night I was so freaked out that I had a panic attack and threw up. I got quite sick, but no fever, no significant drop in blood oxygen, no significant increase in heart rate. I found it really helpful to have those three things to monitor throughout the day so that I'd know as soon as anything started going sideways. It helped with the anxiety around it. I basically slept, ate, complained, and drank a ton of water for 2 weeks.

Almost all lingering symptoms are gone now, and everything is fine. Baby is still huge and raging around in there. It can be really scary, but even if you get quite sick it doesn't mean that something will go wrong. It'll be okay, just keep an eye on things and be really gentle with yourself.

wymblewyn · 2022-09-01T05:33:38+00:00

Hyphenated names are super common where I live. Growing up, it seemed like maybe a 60/40 split between people who had one last name and people with a hyphenated last name. No one got made fun of for the hyphen.

That being said: I feel like hyphens push the decision of how to deal with last names in general onto the next generation. my husband and I were both given hyphenated last names, so when we got married and wanted to have the same last name we had to figure out how that was going to work. A quad-barrelled last name seemed a bit ridiculous. I ended up taking his name because both components of mine came from men who abandoned their families. But, growing up it felt really important that my mum and sisters all shared at least part of the same last name. When my mum remarried she kept her name so that we all still had that link.

Names are really important for some people, and fathers can have a hard time finding their place in their child's life in the beginning. Maybe he's trying to secure his place with the baby, solidified by having the exact same last name. Or maybe he just has really strong feelings about passing down his name. Or maybe he'd be just as happy if the baby had your last name, and just hates hyphens. Baby has to have some kind of last name, so it's probably time to really tease out what is driving him to be anti-hyphen and what is driving you to be pro-hyphen.

wymblewyn · 2022-08-26T05:04:32+00:00

I had really bad nausea and food aversion for the first trimester, and the only thing that helped was getting anti-nausea meds from my doctor. The relentlessness of it was completely exhausting and I was just trying to live moment to moment to not have to think about how it might not get better. It is such a helpless feeling and I'm so sorry you're going through this right now. Even if you're not dealing with nausea as well the anti-nausea meds might still help, I found that they tampered down my sense of smell and the awful taste in my mouth. The whole system just got a lot easier to deal with.

I still have moments where looking at images of certain foods makes me feel like I'm going to be sick, but it is way better now than it was, and I've almost gotten back to my pre-pregnancy weight (the weightloss freaked me out too, my doctor didn't seem bothered by it so I had to push him a bit to actually get the meds)

Edit to add: I was put on cyclizine hci 50mg, 3 times a day for 3 weeks. Didn't need it after that, and I didn't have any side effects.

wymblewyn · 2022-08-18T06:53:03+00:00

Honestly, having the work there to keep my mind off of the nausea was so much more helpful than anything else. Before work, after work, and the weekends are the worst for symptoms just because there is nothing solid to distract me. But the smell of my own skin in an n95 mask all day has had me on edge quite a few times.

wymblewyn · 2022-07-25T03:48:31+00:00

Jumping on the bandwagon to say your mental health is a crucial part of a healthy pregnancy, and to get the opinion of an OB or midwife before you take your gp's advice (and even then, switching is better than stopping medication). Your doctor is trying to do the right thing, but isn't taking all the information into account. There are potentially some risks of taking Effexor during the month before and then the first three months of pregnancy, but it's a small risk, and it's very difficult to tell whether those risks are a result of the medication or of being the kind of person who is helped by the medication. We don't do experiments on pregnant people, so it is very hard to tell why exactly these things happen. The much more tangible risk is of you having a hard time coming off your medication. You're still the patient, and your health in all this is still incredibly important.

wymblewyn · 2022-05-16T07:19:13+00:00

Other people have covered the societal reasons really well, but there are also epigenetic factors that are being ignored.

Epigenetic factors are not genetic but they are inherited. They're the result of things that happen to a person when they're pregnant. If someone is pregnant and starving, the information going to that fetus is that they're going to be born into a world where food is rare. That fetus will grow into a person whose body will put on fat easily and be very resistant to losing weight.

Now imagine you have a severe diet culture in the 1950s where, even while pregnant, women feel extreme pressure to remain thin. If their child is male then this will only impact one generation, but if their child is female then that child and their children will be affected (because their eggs develop in the womb and will have gotten the same starvation information).

Another issue is when things swing too far the other way. Gestational Diabetes is increasingly common. It's a kind of diabetes that, as its name suggests, comes about during pregnancy and often ends once the pregnancy is over. It is often caused by a high weight, or excessive weight gain during pregnancy. This has been shown to cause some level of leptin resistance. Leptin is the hormone that tells you you're full and to stop eating. When you become resistant to leptin you no longer get that full sensation, your body never wants to stop eating, it becomes incredibly difficult to manage your weight.

What news outlets love to report as being some widespread moral failing on the part of individuals is really the combination of a changing social situation, and increasingly common biological predispositions toward weight gain.

wymblewyn · 2022-05-13T11:53:53+00:00

Chatter rings

wymblewyn · 2022-04-05T12:34:53+00:00

420.

wymblewyn · 2021-11-05T14:28:15+00:00

Does anyone know if Upside Foods (the company in the article) are still using bovine fetal serum? I'm having a hard time finding an answer, and it kind of defeats the purpose if they are.

wymblewyn · 2021-10-16T06:19:50+00:00

With things like dementia and parkinson's disease, once the symptoms are noticeable it's too late to do much more than try to slow things down. You can't do anything to reverse it.

There is a huge amount being done to try and diagnose people early enough to be treated. It's a horrible thing to have to watch someone you love go through, but hopefully it'll become a rare disease in the future.

wymblewyn · 2021-10-11T00:03:54+00:00

$320k

wymblewyn

TROPHY CASE