Changing onto cow's milk at 1yr

[viticella]

Ok - we've made it to our first birthday which is wonderful for lots of reasons. I was just making up tomorrow's bottles and realised I don't need to do it much longer, but have no idea how to change over. Do you just throw away the steriliser and that's that?

I thoguht I would continue giving bottles/cups of milk as with the formula, i.e. warmed up and at same times, and gradually move onto having it colder and more as a drink/snack? I've tried him with a few small drinks of cows milk this week and he doesn't seem to mind the taste.

Any ideas welcome!

DUCK AND COVER. Have you seen the cow milk and pus thread??????

I beleive in cows milk - we didn't just stop giving formula at 1 although we did stop sterelising. I use antibac washing up liquid and wash his bottles/cups seperatley from everything else even now and he's nearly 2. As for the milk, we graduated him gradually . gave him cows milk in his cereal and then started mixing his feeds one ounce at a time over several months.

well yes, you can just throw away the steriliser now if you like. you just need to make sure cups etc are clean.

You can just give milk after the first birthday. you may find that you need to gradually "water down" the formula with normal milk though as formula is sweeter than milk and the change might be a bit sudden. but whatever you do, don't fall for the lie that you need any kind of "follow on" type milk - that's just a marketing stunt by the formula companies.

Yeh, cows milk did my two no harm.

My dd has just turned 1 and we're gradually adding more cows milk and less formula to each bottle. She's currently on half and half (3fl oz of each) and hasn't noticed the change so far. I haven't sterilised since 6 months, dh just washed the bottles in really hot water. Now the bottles go in the dishwasher and we wash the teats by hand to make sure there's nothing nasty left. I'm not actually getting rid of the bottles yet, I know the guidelines are to move them onto a cup after a year but she only has milk before her nap and at bedtime so it doesn't seem worth it.
I think that by this age, as long as they are eating a fairly balanced diet, they only need a pint of milk a day to get their calcium requirement. Dd drinks about 10 fl oz out of bottles, the rest is milk on cereal, cheese or milk based sauces/puddings. So you could reduce the amount of milk he has during the day anyway and just keep warm bottles of milk for sleep times.