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Is 7 months the right time to cut out night feed?

3 replies

explodingbosoms · 03/09/2010 16:20

Calling all sleep geeks! Can you help me?

My baby girl is almost 7mo. Her sleep has been up and down really, with the best being a period of sleeping through at around 2mo, and the worst being the damnable 4 month sleep regression.

These days (and nights) her sleep usually looks like this:

3 x 40 min naps in day (very occasionally longer). She will nap in her cot, though has recently started SCREAMING before each nap and needing stroking to sleep whereas before she would self settle. Have not tried to extend naps as I'm worried it will be a world of pain.

Bedtime 7pm. Again, she's become a little trickier to settle recently. Almost always asleep by 7.15pm.

Then she sleeps until 6.30am usually, with two feeds: a dream feed (which we sometimes wake her for, sometimes she wakes up for it) some time between 10pm and 11pm; then a feed any time between 3am and 4.30am. If she wakes before 3am I try to settle her without feeding as I've established a "no feed before 3" rule. Sometimes this means we are up for a while til it reaches 3am.

I'd love to cut out the middle-of-the-night feed but am wondering whether she's too young. On the one hand, the accepted wisdom seems to be that from around 6m they don't need a night feed anymore. On the other hand, she's not taking huge amounts of solids in the day yet and has always been bang on the 50th percentile so not that big, and obviously taking in the right amount of food. I'm wondering whether she does need that night feed.

She's teething at the moment so am not going to embark on anything in the next few days. But what do you think? Should I try to cut out the night feed? And if so, how???

Sorry for mammoth post. Any thoughts much appreciated.

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
memoo · 03/09/2010 16:22

tbh I'd carry on with the night feeds and just wait until she naturally drops them herself.

explodingbosoms · 03/09/2010 16:29

Thanks memoo. I suppose I'm confused about whether she is waking because she's hungry, or for some other reason. It's hard to know how long to try settling her by other means, and I don't want to do that if she really does need the feed. On the other hand I don't want to carry on sticking a boob in her mouth if she doesn't really want feeding!

OP posts:
memoo · 03/09/2010 16:44

Its really hard to know what to do isn't it?

I found with my DC that left to their own devices they all eventually stopped waking for the night feed, DC1 was just 6 weeks, DC3 was 10 months!!!

I suspect you'll probably find that as she has more solids during the day her intake of milk during the nigh will start to reduce

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