This past week, Scotty went on a nursing strike and I had a hard time finding much information about them and why they happen so I thought I'd share my experience to add to what is out there already.
About 3 weeks ago Scotty woke up with a nasty cold and productive cough. It lasted a few days. We survived with a humidifier and lots of Tylenol. His cold evolved into a green runny nose for a day or two and then went away.

A full week went by with Scotty acting normal. Then he started waking up crying in the middle of the night and had a clear runny nose. I was sure it was teething. He had also started biting me while nursing. Again, I attributed it to teething.

Then one morning he just stopped nursing. No interest whatsoever and would even cry when I would offer. He was an exclusively breastfed baby before solids and was still nursing really well three times a day so I was extremely shocked when he just suddenly stopped nursing. Through that day he started shaking his head "no" (at first I thought it was cute and that he was learning to communicate "no"). As the day went on, I realized he would incline his head to the left and shake his head mostly when he was eating solids.

The problem (totally not a problem usually) is that Scotty is an extremely good-natured baby. He doesn't fuss much so sometimes I don't know when something is wrong.

I finally had the thought that the head shaking and the nursing strike could be related. As I googled the two symptoms, I came up with one possible cause in common: an ear infection. It so happened we had an appointment for his 9 month check up the next day so I asked the doc to check his ears and sure enough, he had an ear infection which was residual from the cough/cold he had had 3 weeks ago! She prescribed antibiotics and suggested that I may just need to wean Scotty from breastfeeding now since he was on strike.

I had already tried formula with him because I don't pump very well and he wouldn't drink it, so I knew I HAD to keep nursing somehow.

For the 3 days that he did not even try to nurse, I pumped three times a day. By the third day, my milk was all but gone. I wasn't even pumping an ounce from both sides combined. I was sure I wouldn't be able to nurse again.

On the 4th day, Scotty decided to nurse again (probably from the antibiotics finally kicking in). I had basically no milk but with him nursing again I started producing milk again and I was able to stop giving him bottles.

How I Survived A Nursing Strike:
1. Find the cause. I think the biggest motivator for me was knowing that there was a good reason behind why he wouldn't nurse. It hurt his ears to latch and suck. That gave me hope that once the infection was gone, he would nurse again.

2. Offer, offer, offer. This was the most discouraging thing for me because honestly he really didn't show any interest at all, any of the times I offered. But I think letting him know that it is still there and that I intended to continue to nurse helped him realize it wasn't time to wean.

3. Keep supply up. Some women can exclusively pump and not lose their milk. Not so for me, I looked up foods to increase milk supply. I ate a lot of almonds. :o)

4. Feed the baby! This is terrible but I was so afraid that if I gave him too many bottles he wouldn't want the breast anymore, that I was tempted to with hold until he was hungry enough to nurse. I'm so glad I didn't do that! It would have made him more upset and feel betrayed. I fed him no matter what and made sure he had what he needed.

5. Don't give up! After a couple days I did consider just starting to wean, which would have been totally easy and fine. But my goal was to nurse for a year and I really wanted to do all I could to get to that point if possible. I'm glad I held out one more day before I really started to try to enforce formula!