Nearly 2 - bedtime - bottle

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My DS will be 2 at the end of August. He sleeps really well, sometimes sleeping straight through for 12 - 14 hours. We are VERY lucky in that respect.

However, DS needs a bottle of milk to go to sleep at night. He normally drinks 1.5 bottles. He doesn't feed to sleep but he definitely uses it as a comfort aid to get him to sleep. We have always fed him his milk in baby cradle position and have never got out of that habit. It has been a nice way to bond at bedtime. He has enjoyed it and so have we. He is now getting heavy and it is getting difficult.

Tonight, it has taken over an hour for him to drink his milk as he was messing around with it, something he has started to do recently! If we try to take it away then he cries. My husband is usually still working while I'm putting DS to bed so I still have dinner to make once he has gone to sleep. Tonight we haven't sat down for dinner until 9.20pm - we both usually go to bed at 10.30pm so this isn't ideal. I want to be able to give him his milk when he is downstairs and to have a bedtime routine which doesn't take 1.5 hours including bath!

My DH and I range from thinking that DS needing to be fed milk in order to get to sleep at bedtime and for his nap is a problem and drives us mad, to thinking that we should just suck it up as he sleeps so well once he is asleep. Some people would kill for a 1 year old to sleep as well as he does so I feel bad moaning about him taking too long to do the bedtime routine!

If we try to encourage him to drink the milk himself, either before bed or once in his bedroom, he ends up messing around with it and doesn't really drink much. I've tried to settle him without milk but it doesn't work - I tried staying in the room with him but it just turned into a game for him, he stands up in his cot until I approach it and then lies down. As soon as I walk away from the cot, he will stand up again!

I don't know what to do but am finding the bedroom routine hard at the moment and am also worrying that it is going to get worse and he is going to be even more dependent on the bottle of milk to get to sleep!

Any suggestions appreciated.

My friend is slowly weaning her son from his nightly bottle by reducing the amount of milk every couple of days, he's now down to about 100ml and they are leaving it at that as it works for them all.

It can be really hard to break habits. Dd had a dummy til almost two and we got rid of it by fluke. I couldn't find it one night and it happened to be the night I introduced a duvet and that seemed to replace the comfort.

Could you try a totally new bedtime routine?
Does he need the actual milk to sleep or is it the routine of being cradled and fed?
Does he get a story at bedtime?

X

If this were me I would be tempted to address the two separate issues:

• soothing to sleep
• milk

Soothing to sleep, could you use dummy, sleep toy or just tough it out for a week? This one is very much parental choice, but I think you are facing the choice of how to get your DS to self soothe to sleep.

Milk - my DD is 3 1/2 and still drinks milk before bed, she has it in a cup now, before this is it was a sippy cup with her bedtime story. Her biggest tantrum ever was around swapping bottle for sippy cup, but it was only one nights worth of tantrum.