AIBU to ask nursery to adapt lunch times for DS?

[bouncingblob]

So our son seems to run on an internal bodyclock more like a teenager than a baby.

He's one and in nursery full time, but on weekends, days off or before my maternity ended, he will go to bed sometime between 7 and 8 and sleep for anywhere from 12-14 hours. Then in the afternoon he'll go down for a nap which could last anywhere from 2-3 hours. He's been on one nap a day since 10 months and consolidating sleep like this since about 4 months.

This is great at weekends as we get a lie in and plenty of time to get stuff done too.

He will normally get his breakfast, at the weekends, sometime between 8 and half 9. Then there'll be a bottle before midday, and then the nap normally starts sometime between 11-12. So he's then having lunch between 2-3, and dinner could be starting as late as 6 if he's had a late day. Even with all that, he'll settle no bother for bedtime by 8 at the latest.

All sounds blissful, and indeed it is.

But nursery caters to the masses, not the unicorns. So firstly, we have to wake him up about an hour earlier than he's ready to, which makes him a bit cranky to start the day. Feed him his breakfast and then he's in nursery by 9.

This is where it all goes pear shaped. They feed them lunch around 11-11.30am. This is, as you can see, up to 3-4 hours earlier than he normally has it. It's also less than an hour after his morning bottle, so he's not hungry, and the end result is he's almost never eating his lunch at nursery.

He'll go down for his nap and they give them a smaller snack around 3ish, which he sometimes takes and sometimes doesn't.

Obviously I know the nursery can't change their entire way of doing things to accommodate one child, nor would I ask them to. But equally, particularly considering he's over one and will soon be weaned off the bottle, it's not going to be viable to have him skip lunch 5 days a week.

Do you think it would be a reasonable accomodation if I asked them to just let him have his lunch during snack time, and to skip that morning lunch feed instead?

Of course he was full enough, don’t be mad. The dinner and pudding and previous bottle wouldn’t have even left his stomach, which is much smaller than ours, by the time he had the second bottle.

He’d had a change of routine so was out of whack but the solution is not to reintroduce night feeds. He’s not hungry.

Op he is just a little boy who is needing you to take the lead for him, and he will follow - maybe not at first, but he will.

I promise he isn't some "unicorn" that needs pints of milk to function.

You need to take the decision about what his routine is going to be; instead you were wanting to ask the nursery to accommodate his routine, rather than face his discontent about a change!

You need to be gently firm and he will come round. He is only little and he needs you to take the lead for him on this. No child needs that much milk after a meal, despite what he may be asking for. If you think he needs liquid, just give him water. Tomorrow you could try watering his milk down a tiny bit if you think he needs the hydration.

I would ditch the am/ mid morning bottle, keep the arvo and evening bottles for now.
hopefully with no am bottle he will eat better at lunch.
then in two weeks start to decrease the afternoon bottle. You can go pretty slowly, an oz every 2-3 days.

keep the evening bottle till all is calm and settled and then either eliminate it (again can do so slowly) or move to a beaker cup. It’s no harm to him if he’s still having a cup of warm milk after his dinner even at 18 months or 2 as long as you clean teeth after :)

sorry you got so slammed in the comments. If I had a kiddo who slept until 8am I would roll with it too!

My teenager is not ready for breakfast by 8 or even 9:30 at the weekend 🤣 Never was even as a toddler. 11 is very early for lunch and I'm sure it was more like 12 when mine were that age.

Im absolutely convinced this is a wind up/baiting post… and everyone is biting!

14oz milk, adults would feel full after that!!

Firstly I have worked in many nurseries and the earliest lunch has been 12pm with a mid morning snack at 10/10:30 so your nursery is very unusual imo. Also you went from no way is my child going cold turkey for their 3 bottles to immediately taking 2 of them in one day. I call BS on this

My daughter was 20 months until she ate enough for reduce her formula and 24 months before she was off it completely.

She continued to have 2 cups of oat milk (3-4oz) twice a day at nursery until 4, 2oz in the night until nearly 3 and 6-8oz before bed until 5.

At 10 months we switched to the routine I shared earlier where the formula was separated from meals under dietician control (food allergies and reflux). At 10 months she had a morning nap and a 5oz bottle but when we dropped the nap at 13 months we dropped that bottle.

How quickly did he drink the first bottle, I wonder if combined with the evening meal it caused him to reflux this evening if he drank it quickly and ended up with a fuller stomach than intended. Reflux can cause comfort feeding as it soothes the reflux but also triggers more. At about 15 months my daughter had a silent reflux relapse and went from 8oz of formula before bed with 3oz once or twice a night to 8 Oz formula before bed and 4 5oz bottles in the night!! I'm sure she would have had more of we let her. The first couple of nights we thought she was hungry but I then realised it was reflux we got a review with her paediatrician and were strict with not offering more formula within 3-4h of the last bottle and reduced the volume in each bottle and that helped. We managed to get her down to 1-2 Oz once or twice a night.

Lol you think I didn't try water? As I said, milk was last resort.

I gave him a beaker of water and he took one sip then threw the beaker across the room.

It was milk or cry it out, those were the only two options.

He did sleep all the way through the night afterwards. Still asleep now!

I gave him a beaker of water and he took one sip then threw the beaker across the room.

Truthfully OP you are letting him get the better of you. That's basically just a tantrum and he's getting big enough to start pattern-setting with that.

I know it's hard - even when they are bigger it feels easier to give them what they want. But as a pp said, there is a difference between want and needs and we need to distinguish that as parents. If he threw the water, he wasn't really thirsty.

”It was milk or cry it out, those were the only two options.”
Those are not the only two options when the child is one.
Cry it out is shutting the door and leaving a child to scream on their own - you don’t have to do that simply because you aren’t giving additional milk.

He’s of an age where he’s going to start screaming and shouting more to show his dislike, it doesn’t mean you just give in. 14oz of milk total shortly after a full meal and dessert is an insane decision to make as a parent. It’s far too much for the stomach size.

This

that is called a strop 😂

Pray tell what the other option was?

I tried and exhausted every other option. NOTHING settled him. Not cuddles, not toys, not water, not Calpol, not a change of room, not even Ms Rachel. He cried through it all like he was being tortured and the more you tried to sooth him, the angrier he got. The child was not thirsty, he was hungry. He was either going to get the bottle and go straight asleep (which he did - and again I had to wake him up for nursery or he'd have slept on even longer) or I was going to have to watch him cry, with nothing soothing him, for God knows how long until he eventually went asleep.

It's worth remembering as well that this was not 14oz all in one go but rather two 7oz feeds separated by a couple of hours.

And despite what the geniuses here said would happen, there was no reflux and no vomiting.

It is going to take time to shift his appetite, hang on in there.

I can't speak for everyone, but I am commenting based on experience. My youngest son (of 3) used to communicate his hunger as asking for "milky". This began prior to speech, as baby signing.

Unfortunately, I was very ill during his early years so my husband picked up a lot of the childcare when home from work. I later learned that instead of feeding him food when communicating his hunger, he took him literally and gave him, probably, several beakers of milk daily. (I would have assumed he'd had breakfast and lunch from husband, but likely had filled up on milk those days with just a little food instead.) I usually fed dinner, as my condition improved later in the day.

By age 2, he was intolerant of dairy - daily diarrhoea. So we went from constant milk to zero. I don't know the long term impact on his health, but wish he'd had normal levels of dairy in his diet growing up, rather than the substitutes he barely tolerated in small quantities.