MOTF's prescription for easy weaning

Well, maybe not easy. But easier:

Step 1. One night baby doesn't ask to nurse, so you don't offer. (Now mind you, at this point you should have gradually worked your way down to one feeding per day...let's call it the "digestif.")

Step 2. He goes to bed, and you fall apart while your SO looks on helplessly. You wax nostalgic for the good old days, when your little guy high-fived you during feedings...laughed a muffled laugh while still latched on as you played "this little piggy"...mimicked your horrible attempt to soothe through song ("Baaaahp, Daaaahd"--his version of the opening lines of "Bye, Baby Bunting").

Step 3. You make a disclaimer that--for the next month (at least!)--any bad behavior on your part can be attributed to said weaning and should be pardoned without question.

Step 4. Your SO, in a rare moment of heroicism, decides an intervention is necessary to bring all this doomsday talk to a halt. He goes to the kitchen, returns with a cranberry+vodka combo despite knowing you don't do hard alcohol (but give the guy a break; the singularity of purpose required to make a late-night grocery store run for diapers, wipes and [now] whole milk does not allow for other considerations of equal if not greater urgency such as the purchase of adult staples like, say, a 6-pack of Sam Adams Winter). "It's all we have," he says in response to your don't-you-know-me-better-than-this-after-10-years-together-and-22-hours of labor-after-which-I-bore-your-child? look.

Step 5. Just take the cocktail and enjoy it; maybe even have another. You haven't indulged without that nagging conscience of yours weighing in like it's Prohibition ("you're a nursing mother, you know"), in, what, 21 months?

All the more reason to take it slow, oh liberated one.