It really is different nursing an older baby or toddler. I’ve heard women say that they would never nurse a baby that could ask to nurse. While that might work for them, I found that breastfeeding just started to get easy around the time my babies started to talk. At the end of the first year we’d solved most of the problems, the pressure was off because the children were eating other foods as well, but the comfort and bonding were still there (oh yeah, and it was still excellent nutrition). Also little kids say really funny things about anything in their life — including nursing.  Anyway, this is a long introduction to an article that is a taste of what it can be like to nurse a toddler. Molly Remer writes about her 2 1/2 year old:

At dinner, eating grapes, my boy picks out a large grape and a very small grape. He is delighted with the small grape, “baby grape! Baby grape!” He holds up the large one and announces, “Mama grape.” He sets them on the table and carefully pushes the small grape towards the large one until they are touching. “Dat baby grape have na-nas!” he reports with obvious satisfaction. Later, he eats them both.

This is just a tiny excerpt — check out the whole thing at Literary Mama. It’s called Nursing Johnny Depp. (There is a plastic Jack Sparrow action figure involved here…)