Last bottle at 8pm but wakes at 12.30am - any advice?

[MissObsessed]

My DS is 19 weeks and is FF on demand and has regular naps throughout the day.

For the past few nights he has had a bottle around 8pm and gone to sleep. Lovely I thought, give him a dream feed around 10.30/11 and that should give me a decent stretch of sleep. Problem is he will not take a dream feed, literally cannot open his mouth to get the bottle in. He then sleeps until around 12.30am, feeds again at around 3.30am and then is unsettled until we get up around 6/6.30.

I know his sleep looks good however my evenings are taken up with either going to bed at 8.30pm to get a decent stretch of sleep before the 12.30 feed or unfortunately waking him as I carry him up to bed at 10.30pm.

As my DH doesn't get in from work until 7pm, me going to bed at 8pm means we don't get a lot of time together.

Will the gaps between his feeds just naturally lengthen (so he drops the 12.30am feed) or is there anything I can try. I'm more than happy to just go with it at the moment but would be nice to have some evenings with DH

The gaps will lengthen in time. Encouraging resetting (ie with a dummy) rather than feeding is a good way to encourage this though.

What I'd do is deliberately wake baby when I go to bed, rather than aiming to keep baby asleep during the feed (I've never done this, I cant see such passive feeding as a good thing).

So for SIDS safer sleep recommendations, baby would be sleeping downstairs with me in the evening. Then when I'm ready to go to bed I would life baby, hope that he's stir if I take hin upstairs and then feed. If he didn't wake properly, Id change nappy. A bit of naked bun time usually wakes them.

Then after the feed, resettle back to sleep and hope for an early morning (4am ish) feed.

Thanks for the advice, will try that tonight if he goes to sleep at 8pm again. Then if I stay up until 10.30 only for him to still not feed I know not to meddle with it all and just go with it

DS stays downstairs we me until I'm ready to go to bed but then I try so hard not to wake him that it's actually comical. Like you say, there's not much point in trying to feed him while he's asleep, I'd hate for someone to try and force feed me (well....unless it was cake..)