Reduce night feeds 6 months

[PinkPlantCase]

Hi all, DS is 6 months old. He’s been having solids for a few weeks with blw and is fairly good at feeding himself, I wouldn’t say he has full meals yet but some food is definitely going down. Apart from the food he is breast fed.

I go back to work in the new year and I’m getting so fed up with being the only one who can settle him in the night. He wakes up every 1 - 2 hours, the only way he will go back to sleep is to feed him.

Next week we’re going to do some very gentle sleep training so that he can settle without a boob in his mouth.

BUT I think he does still need food in the night. He isn’t just sleepy sucking, he’s having several full feeds.

I don’t know if changing to more mashed up baby food would help him sleep more, if he has more food in him.

I considered changing one of the night time breastfeeds to formula but I’m worried about him having too many calories.

He’s already huge, around 95th percentile.

I just don’t really know what to d, but I do really want to reduce his night time breastfeeds

I'd be careful because there are a lot of quacks in the sleep world who don't understand how breastfeeding works and/or are working off total rubbish that isn't evidence based.

OTOH the "help" from a lot of people who do understand BF is just that it's normal or to wait for it to stop by itself. Which is nice if you need reassurance, but not especially helpful if you're struggling.

I'd trust Prof Amy Brown on this topic or Lyndsay Hookway. Will find you some links.

www.instagram.com/lyndsey_hookway/guide/night-waking/17860464776357138/?hl=en

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/amy-brown/does-anyone-really-sleep-_b_16971544.html

At this age he will still feed at night. Feeding to sleep is the quickest way of settling him and anything else is likely to upset the routine you've built.

That said, both mine went through frequent wake ups at 6 months. It passes in a week or two.

At 9 month feeding to sleep stopped working so I did controlled crying then to get them to sleep through

Is he taking in enough milk during the day?

@De88

Is he taking in enough milk during the day?

He could probably have more in the afternoon.

Currently he has the following milk feeds (approximately) during the day.

• 8:30am

Solid breakfast normally fruit or bits of porridge

-11am & Midday, this is before and after a nap

Solid lunch - fruit or veg and maybe some of my crusts. We’ve only just started introducing wheat.

• 2pm & 3/4pm ish before and after his nap

Solid dinner, some of whatever we’re having

• 7pm big feed before bed.

I used to feed him again at 5/6 ish but he wasn’t interested so I stopped offering. Maybe he would have it if we went off to somewhere quieter. When we first started weaning I would offer him milk before every meal but again he wasn’t particularly interested.

@Twizbe he’s been like this since the 6 month sleep regression so I don’t think it’s just a blip for 6 months. He never learnt how to link his sleep cycles without help.

What’s change is that we now co sleep for half the night but he’s wanting to do that for more and more of the night now.

@BertieBotts thankyou for the links!! It’s so hard to know who to trust.

In an ideal world we’d just co-sleep all night and not worry about it but I really do want DH to be able to do some of the night wake ups on his own once I’m at work.

Perhaps try a snack in the day at one of the feed times.

Honestly, I'm a big believer in doing what works until it stops working. If cosleeping and feeding to sleep are working, don't change it. Chances are you'll only make it worse.

Introduce something new to get them to sleep if what you're doing now stops working.

I understand the desire to split the nights when you go back to work, but if doing so is going to make things harder - don't do it. I always found that I woke up regardless of whether it was me or DH that went to see to them. I still do.

Controlled crying worked great for us and only took a couple of nights, but like I say, the feeding to sleep had stopped working at that point.

I did this when DC2 was 7 months and it worked well. I just reduced the feeds by one minute each night. She still didn't sleep through the night I'm afraid but she went longer until the first waking then I just put her in bed with me (we used to co-sleep from the time of first waking) and she would go back to sleep straight away and usually go through until morning without waking again. It took about a week and I never fed at night again.

When are you going back to work? If it's next month then yes it's worth trying to work on DH being able to settle him now. If you're going back at 9 months or later then just wait. Things might get easier by themselves by the time you need to worry about it.

They are all different, DS2 was very much like that, not linking sleep cycles. He woke up several times a night until he was 2.5 and then I decided I was going to try and get him to settle a different way so introduced a little delay before feeding him in the night and he went from 3 wake ups to sleeping through

However then we had another baby when he turned 3 and I can count on one hand how Moby nights he's slept through since the baby was born. The four month old sleeps better than he does a lot of the time!

If you want to reduce cosleeping I found it helpful to give myself a time limit, so up until midnight for example I always tried to settle him back in his room, but any later wakes I brought him in straight away.

DS also had a few weeks of waking more frequently when he was 6 months - but it wasn’t as bad as your son.

Will he take more milk during the day if you feed in a darkened room with no noise or other distractions? Maybe try white noise during feeds? Dangle position? Holding your phone above your boob so that when he turns his head and opens his mouth to chew on the phone you can try to slip a nipple in? He’s only feeding before and after naps during the day so I take it he’s too distracted to feed the rest of the time.

What hours will you be working and when does your baby go to bed and wake up?