Weaning is one of those things nobody really prepares you for. Not the practicalities, not the emotions, not the particular kind of guilt that sits on both sides of it, yours and theirs. You know it has to happen. You want it to happen, mostly. And yet every time feels like the wrong time, and every approach feels either too abrupt or too slow, and you are just there, in the middle of it, trying to find something that works without breaking anyone in the process.
I know my son. I know how he thinks, what moves him, what he connects to. And what Ian has always connected to, from very early on, are stories. Not just listening to them. Living inside them. If there is a bear in a book, he is the bear. If there is a train with a name, he is that train, completely, for as long as the story lasts. So when I started thinking about weaning, I thought about that. About finding a way to bring this transition to him through something he already trusted, a character he already loved, in a world he was already dreaming about.
Ian had a character. His name was Tuca. I had been telling Ian small Tuca stories for a long time before any book existed, woven into ordinary moments, toothbrushing, getting dressed, the small gaps in a day that need something to hold a toddler's attention. Tuca was as real to Ian as anyone we knew. And at the time I started thinking about writing this book, Ian was deep in his rocket phase. Planets, astronaut suits, countdowns from five to one with both arms in the air. The moon was somewhere he genuinely planned to go.
Ian also had his own word for breastfeeding. He called it boo boos, pointed and said it with complete confidence from very early on, and boo boos it became for all of us.
I had a character he loved. A world he was living in. A word that was entirely his. And a transition that needed to feel like an adventure, not a loss.
So I wrote the book.
In the story, Tuca decides he wants to go to space. He wants to see the planets, eat Martian bananas, blast off in a rocket. But going to space means being truly ready. And part of being ready is not needing boo boos anymore. It is not a sad story. Tuca is not losing something. He is becoming someone who can go further.
That book is called No More Boo-Boo Milk, Now I'm an Astronaut.
Did it work straight away? No. I want to be honest with you about that because I think the honest version is more useful than the version where I say I read it once and everything changed. What it did was give us a language. A shared reference point Ian had already chosen to love. I could talk about Tuca during the day, outside of feeding times, and Ian would engage with it as a story rather than as a negotiation. Slowly, over time, with a lot of patience and a lot of repetitions, the book became part of how he understood what was happening and why. He was not being asked to give something up. He was being invited to go somewhere bigger.
There is a moment near the end of the book that I love. A small, quiet moment where Tuca makes a choice. Not because someone told him to. Not because it was taken from him. Because he felt ready. Because growing felt bigger than staying. Because the next thing was calling him and he was brave enough to answer.
And that is what I hope this book offers you too, not a solution, not a shortcut, but a soft and steady companion for a journey that is harder than anyone tells you, and more beautiful than you expect.
I wrote this book for Ian. But if it finds its way to another child, in another house, in another heart, and that child looks at Tuca and sees themselves, and something in them shifts, even just a little, then it became something bigger than I planned.
That is all any book can hope to do.