8m old bottles, food, sleep…thought?!

[ShleepyMumma]

Hello!

All of my Mum friends are breast feeders and I’d love some advice/thoughts on bottle feeding times etc.
We currently do roughly:
7am bottle
8.30am breakfast
9.30am Nap
1130 lunch or bottle
1230 bottle of lunch (whichever wasn’t done first)
1400/1430 nap
1530/1600 bottle
1730 Dinner
1845 Bedtime bottle

It’s not really working…I feel she is still hungry sometimes/ agitated and her naps have been getting shorter, wondered if hunger related.
The internet (favourite place 😂) often says bottle/breast every 2.5-3 hours. And my breastfeeding friends always feed before naps etc so seem to feed more often. I have 4 hour gaps between bottles really.
Bottle amounts vary as I keep changing my mind what to do- less so she eats more solids? More but then solid learning isn’t great. Brain fog!!
Any bottle feeding Mammas found something that seems to work well?

How much formula is she drinking and what kinds of solids is she having @ShleepyMumma?

Is she following her centiles as well?

Sounds very similar to what I was doing at 8m. My DD was having 4x 6oz bottles, 3 meals and 2 naps.

There is a sleep regression around this time so her poor sleep might be linked to that.

@BunnyRuddington
We were doing 6oz bottles, but I’ve just started trying 5oz bottles in the hope it’ll encourage her to eat more with solids.
Solids wise she has some finger food and some mush 3 times a day. Portion wise hard to say, I’m not sure what’s normal. She was really poor at eating solids but has improved greatly. She still doesn’t eat an awful lot I don’t think.
Some say give bottle before nap, some say start cutting a bottle.
I have a weaning book (AK one) that says baby should be on 3 meals and less bottles etc.
Should I give bottle first, then solids? Switch it around. With lunch, should I give solids first and bottle straight after like a top up? Or wait an hour and then give it? With that it feels like she is always eating but that’s ok if it’s best?

@ShleepyMumma Your schedule is almost identical to ours. We did some sleep training and were given the timings by the lady we spoke to. I always do solids first but not sure there's a right or a wrong way tbh - USA says milk first from what I can see, whereas UK usually says solids first. Two things we might be doing differently:

1 - no milk or food within 60 minutes before sleep. At this age we were told they've grown out of needing milk to sleep and actually need time to digest. Our last bottle is at 6pm so basically dessert. In bed at 7pm.

2 - our afternoon nap is minimum 90 minutes. If DS wakes before then we lay him back down and tell him it's nap time. He didn't really protest tbh and has started sleeping longer some days on his own (still a work in progress!)

With a longer afternoon nap he's less tired at dinner time and eats more (he's a good eater anyway) but I think the key for us with sleep was separating sleep and food - he started sleeping way later in the morning when we started feeding him earlier. Weird I know! Possibly coincidence?

I think it's completely different when you formula feed. All my BF friends are still getting up to feed in the night, feeding to sleep etc - night waking is way more common in BF babies after 6 months. None of that is wrong but it's a lot harder to incorporate into a "normal" day. I spent the first 6 months mourning not being able to BF. Now I think it's the best thing that could've happened!

Personally, I'd look at putting the bottles back up to the size she's used to but drop one.

So maybe you could do something like this:

7am Breakfast with a cup of formula.

10.30 Bottle

12 lunch.

Bring nap slightly forward and do Bottle on wake up.

Dinner at 5pm and then Bedtime bottle at usual time.

Does that sound as though it might work?

What you're aiming at is 13.5 floz a day at 10 months, moving down to 10 floz of full fat cows milk at 12 months.

Once she's on less than 20 floz of formula a day you'll need to introduce a vitamin daly as well

My DS is also 8 months but has been refusing daytime bottles for a few weeks now so now he just has 7oz at about 7.30am and the same again around 6.45 before bed. Otherwise he has breakfast around 8ish, morning naps are now hit n miss sometimes only about 10 mins, lunch at 12ish (main and pudding) afternoon nap around 2-3.30pm then dinner at 5pm (again main and pudding). I’ve been trying to offer water with meals and give him watery fruit and veg like watermelon and cucumber as was worried about his fluid intake

Once mine hit three meals a day they had morning bottle, breakfast, mid morning bottle, lunch, mid afternoon bottle, dinner, bedtime bottle. Both weaned early though as not keen on milk. Might be trickier to manage this if you have one that likes bottles.

@Timeturnerplease Thats the bottles we do now. How did you fit them around naps as well? And how long did you leave between bottle and solid meal? Thank you

Ah well mine only napped/nap for half an hour at a time, so fitting them in was easy enough by 8 months. DD1 was roughly:

6am: Bottle
7.30am: Breakfast
9am: Nap
9.30/10am: Bottle
12pm: Lunch
1pm: Nap
2pm: Bottle
4.30pm: Dinner
6pm: Bottle

I don’t breed sleepers, and we run on an early bedtime/early wake schedule because when I’m not on mat leave we have to get the children to their grandparents by 7.15am so I can get to school to set up for the day. However, a lot of DD1’s peers ran on a similar routine just with longer naps.

It’s worth also noting that DD1 took hardly any of the mid morning and mid afternoon bottles, so we switched to snacks instead once I relaxed a bit about her milk intake. DD2 is 5.5 months and already refusing them, so I’ll have to wait for the next paeds appointment but I think she’ll have to switch over to snacks too pretty soon.

Obviously all children are different, but my two seemed to fall into this routine fairly easily.