8 month old & feeding & sleeping... Help!

[MrsRV]

Hi there,

DD is 8 months old, this is an average day:-

6.30 wake up & have 7oz milk
Sometimes a nap before breakfast
9am breakfast (porridge or weetabix with fruit puree & 2oz milk mixed in)
10.30/11 another nap
12pm lunch - finger foods like breadsticks & houmous or cream cheese sandwiches with fresh fruit/veg sticks.
2.30/3pm - 5oz milk
Another nap
5pm - dinner - usually, if I'm honest, 1/2 an Ella's kitchen pouch(!) she's quite good with lumps so we're on stage 3 food & it's going well. Followed by yoghurt & fruit puree mixed in.
Sometimes another nap!!
6.45 bath
7/7.30 7oz bottle & bed. Then she sleeps straight through.

So.... Am I doing it right?? Should she really just have 1 nap in the morning before lunch & then another in the afternoon? When does napping stop? & do they just stop being tired or do u actually try to keep them awake?

Also, milk feeds, I guess the first to go is the 2/3pm bottle, followed by the first bottle of the day & eventually the bedtime bottle.... When do u drop the feeds?

Just when you think you've mastered one thing... It all bloody changes!!!

[wewereherefirst]

That sounds lovely to me! They will drop naps when ready as with the feeds, although I used to keep ds1 awake in the mornings for groups and he had a long afternoon nap. DS2 does his own sodding thing, so I'm probably not best placed to advise.

[ceeveebee]

I don't think there is a right and wrong, all babies are different and want to drink/eat/sleep at different times

But fwiw at that age my twins were roughly the same with breakfast and tea, but they had just one morning nap after breakfast, then a mid morning bottle, lunch about 1230, nap about 130 and bottle at 3.

[Lexiesgirl]

That sounds about right! Very similar to what my 10mo is still doing:

7am - about 6oz bottle
8.30 - porridge or Weetabix
9ish - nap for 30 mins to an hour
12ish - lunch, likes the big meal here so something like pasta and veg, yoghurt and fruit
1-2 ish - long nap, 1-2 hours normally, might have some of the bottle before sleep
Finishes the 7-8oz bottle throughout the afternoon
5ish - tea, sandwich or scrambled egg or something lighter
7 - bath
7.30 - 6-7oz bottle, bedtime

We're just now starting to lower all the bottles to 7oz from 8 and introducing snacks (raisins, banana, rice cakes etc) in the afternoon to encourage her to start to drop this bottle.

The other day when we accidentally forgot to make the bottles at night she had Weetabix first, but she's obviously not ready to drop the breakfast bottle as she still screamed for it! Occasionally she will refuse to sleep in the afternoon but again she's obviously not ready for it as she is exhausted by bedtime.

Remember milk is still their main source of calories and nutrients until they are 1, so I'd say you still have a while before you need to think about dropping bottles. Also naps, they just tend to not want to settle, or wake up earlier, or not go to sleep at bedtime, so it tends to be relatively obvious.

But it really sounds like your DD is doing what most 8mo do, and I've found that DD has been settled into this routine for quite a while now so you might find that there isn't much to change until nearer 1 year.