Dream feeding?

[TLH0307]

Hello, my 6 week old girl (bottle fed) has for the past week or so been feeding after her bath at 8pm, then sleeping until around 1:30am...I’m counting my lucky stars as she hasn’t always been so settled! I was wondering if it was worth trying to dream feed at 11pm ish, just to see if she could go an hour or two longer.

Would you bother trying to do this, or do you think the best way is to just stick with what I’ve got and wait until she starts having bigger bottles and perhaps sleeping longer?

I’m a first time mum so pretty clueless when it comes to building a nighttime routine, just playing it by ear!

P.s she’s very windy so my concern with dream feeding would be that she’d wake up whilst being winded anyway!

I’ve been doing that for 4/5 months, but she is breast fed. I’d really like to do it with a bottle in the hope that formula would fill her up more but my worries are same as yours with wind - would winding her properly wake her up?
When Oh has done it on the few nights I’ve been out it’s worked quite well.
Try it and see if it works, over a few nights

What was she doing before?
Before we started an earlier bedtime of 7.30 my DD would have a feed at 10.30 then go through until 3-4am so when we started the earlier bedtime I did a dream feed otherwise she’d wake up at 12–1 for a feed.
She very rarely properly woke up during the dream feed.
It’s worth a try to get that extra hour and if you find she wakes up you don’t have to keep doing it

There are other threads on this, but from what I hear its not worth it. For some it has just added an extra wake up as baby then wakes up expecting an extra feed.
Also, do babies actually accept a 'dream feed' surely baby needs to wake up to feed.
I think its a load of tosh to be honest. Just wake up and feed and accept the sleep after. She may go a bit longer, but then you'd probably get a shorter sleep afterwards.

It’s definitely been a great strategy for me. She never wakes, never refuses, feeds a lot, and by doing it my sub conscious knows to ignore any little noises for however many hours as it’s not hunger. When I haven’t done it I’ve found myself waking up constantly thinking ‘it’s 12pm, is this hunger or not’
I like to do it on my own time, before my bedtime, to prolong the wake up.
I think it’s something experts recommending dropping at about 7 months

Dream feed worked great for us as well. We started at around 8 weeks. We managed to completely drop post midnight feeds by 9-10 weeks. By 12 weeks, DD consistently slept from 6.30pm to 6.30/7am with one dream feed (initially at 11pm, later - at 10.30pm).

We dropped the dream feed at 8 months. We tried to do it earlier and it kind of worked (i.e. DD still "slept through" the night) but she started waking up at around 6am stirring and moaning (with the dream feed, she woke up at 6.30/7am chatting and giggling). I decided I would take the dream feed over early morning wakings, reinstated it for a month and gradually dropped it. The second attempt was smooth and painless.

The 2 reasons why DF worked for us I think were: (1) the fact that DD was taking full feeds at 10.30-11pm (she did wake up but she went to sleep very quickly) and (2) we had an alternative settling mechanism for DD if she woke up after the dream feed (shushing/patting). I was also very consistent.

It worked really well for us with both DC. It can take a week or so for them to adjust go it, but when they did it moved that big chunk of sleep from 10-4 which was great. It's worth a try, just keep it very dark and quiet when you feed them.

I very carefully fed her 1 oz just as a little top up at 11pm (didn’t dare do anymore in case she got windy/sick)...she took it no problem! However she woke at 3 and didn’t go back down for the rest of the night 😩 I think we’ve decided to just make her bathtime a bit later so she sleeps til 3/4, then as she naturally starts to sleep longer then we’ll move her bathtime gradually more and more earlier. Hoping this works although I’m sure it’s not the quickest way of doing things!