In the home stretch!

This summer has been the craziest that my family has been through. Four weddings, a trip to the beach, a birthday, two trips to Atlanta, a trip overseas, family and friends visiting us, starting home-schooling, damage from storms, starting two new jobs (luckily one is temporary)...it's just been wild. We're in the last two weeks of it - my daughter is in Maryland this week with her grandparents, and next week my husband and son will go up there to visit and pick her up, and then the kids will go to the beach with my parents while my husband and I are at a conference in Atlanta. Labor Day, we'll all come back home, and we'll be able to breathe a sigh of relief until the holiday season. Even for me, the amount that we've been doing has been too much.

Through all of this, my son has kept nursing. Even when we've been separated for three or four days, whenever we've come back together, he's eventually asked to nurse again. Some days he may nurse as many as four times; other days not at all. We're definitely in the last parts of our nursing days.

Even knowing this, I'm not totally prepared for the idea that he may wean completely next week. We'll be separated for seven nights and eight days while he's in Maryland and down in Gulf Shores - by far the longest period of time we've been separated. By the end of it, I don't know that he'll be thinking about nursing at all. I don't know that I want him to be thinking about nursing by that time either. But whenever I think that this Sunday/Monday might be the last time he nurses, I get a sad little ache around my heart.

Don't get me wrong - we've been nursing just over three years now, so it's not like he'll be weaning early. I have plenty of good nursing memories with both of my kids to look back on. Knowing, however, that he is my last, that this is the last child I'll ever nurse...it makes me a little melancholy, something I have never expected to feel when it came down to it.

Ah well. Life will be full of such lettings go. Right now, my daughter is in Maryland with her grandparents, and I won't see her for two weeks - much, much longer than I've ever gone with not seeing her. It's probably the combination of this next step along the path of my daughter's independence combined with the possibility of my son weaning that is making me feel sadder about this than I thought I would. And I know that when it's all said and done, I won't really give it another thought; it'll just be another parenting milestone hit, so to speak.

But for right now, I'm just a little sad about it all.