My baby boy has just turned 4 months and is a perfectly smiley, strong, bottle fed boy however for the past few weeks he's been extremely challenging. Throughout the day he is mostly fine, except that when he fusses for a feed he only drinks a couple of ounces then starts crying. If I put the bottle anywhere near his mouth after that he cries more. Often at this point I have to get up and walk around with him to stop him. He's then perfectly happy to play for a bit. Later he looks for his feed again, but does the same all over again. It takes 2 or 3 sittings to get through a bottle, but more often than not he doesn't finish it on time and we end up making lots of bottles throughout the day and wasting milk. Also can't get him on any sort of feeding schedule because of this.
Then it all gets a million times worse at night - he's tired from around 8pm and will sleep in my arms but wakes every hour or so crying hysterically and inconsolably. If I put him in his crib he wakes every 10 minutes crying. When he wakes he doesn't even want to look at milk, but will eventually take some to help him fall asleep after being exhausted from crying. He won't settle down in his crib properly until anywhere between 11pm-2am
We've tried changing to a bigger teat size in case he's frustrated and hungry but no difference. I've considered that he could be overtired and refusing the bottle for sending him to sleep and so we've tried making sure he's in a quiet, darkened room to rest any time he shows tiredness cues, and also ensuring he's never awake longer than 2 hours without encouragement to nap - no difference
I don't want to take him to docs as he's a very healthy weight so doesn't really seem like a health concern
Has anyone dealt with similar and have suggestions to improve this? We're exhausted and sick of making countless bottles and pouring half of the milk down the sink