Very gentle weaning advice please

[glummum1988]

Hi all

My bubs is 8.5months (7weeks premature so almost 7months corrected) and formula fed. She has a dream feed at 10:30pm and then wakes once around 2:45am when we feed her. She barely has half a normal feed and goes straight back to sleep. Is she naturally weaning her own night feed? How could we very gently give her a little nudge to drop the night feed all together? We practice very gentle parenting and will not leave her to cry so any advice how we do this as softly as possible would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance xx

I had a 8.5 week preemie and we were told only to drop the feed when she stopped having it altogether, as in not do anything to speed things up. With my full term baby we were able to nudge things along a bit but not with a preemie. I'm afraid you just need to wait it out I think.

My DD was 4 weeks premature (and tiny) and she was doing the same so I tried just giving her her dummy one night instead of a feed and she went straight back to sleep and never woke for that feed again. She was waking out of habit it turns out. Does your LO take a dummy?

@Vicky1989x yes we use the dummy to trigger sleep but she doesn't have it in her mouth all night. Will give that a go, but like @YarnOver said I have been a bit unsure whether we should stop the feed anyway.
Got a bit of advice from a fb group that I'm in today and they advised not weaning any feed for any child until they are at least 1!
Thanks for your advice both xx

I would follow that advice. I don't actually agree with it for full term babies, because they do sometimes just wake out of habit and it's for comfort. In that situation they can be cuddled back to sleep or you could bedshare or something (we did gentle parenting too) but for preemies you definitely shouldn't wean them until they refuse the bottle entirely. 4 weeks is classed as late prem but 8 weeks is just on the border from moderately to very prem - 32 weeks is the cut off so our little one was very prem (just) at 31.5 weeks...and when you get to the very / moderate prem you don't wean them off any feeds until they do!