9 month breastfeeding

[helloitsme4321]

Hello

My little girl is nearly 9 months. Breastfed but has taken a bottle (when she feels like it) but we don't give her a bottle regularly.

At 3 months, she was nearly through the night. Since then, we've gone so far backwards.

She feeds every two hours at night. From the moment she goes to sleep too. Bedtime 7.30-8 and she goes down well. She'll wake at 9.30/10, 12, 2 and so on. She feeds and mostly goes straight back to sleep. But she's so regular it's insane. She's never gone more than 3 hours (in 3 months at least).

It's killing me a little. I know it's natural and sleep development bla bla but if there's anything you think will help me, please share. My husband keeps suggesting we give her a bottle at night but I just don't think it'll help? I don't know how this would make it any easier, what would it change?

So tired. So confused. Need sleep xx

Mine were the same at this age, comfort feeding all night.
With my DD I think at around 12 months I first stopped feeding on the first / second wake up, took a few nights to accept some water and a cuddle. After that I'd still bring her into bed.
Then when she was a bit older, maybe 18months, I stopped night feeds altogether , there's a picture book that helped her understand a bit, and would offer a cup of milk when I brought her into my bed, again took a few nights to accept it.
She still wasn't a great sleeper until about 2 though... fine usually now !

This will be feeding for comfort, not feeding for calories. So swapping to night bottle feeds won't make any difference.

The way to solve it is to introduce an alternate way to comfort baby to sleep without feeding. Do you have any way at all that you can get baby to sleep without feeding? It might be time to start thinking about this, even if it's a long term plan to move away from feeding to sleep.

We've just been through exactly this. With my first, I breastfed whenever she woke until over age 1, and she started sleeping through soon after.

My 9 month old slept through a couple of nights when he was 4 months old but that was it. He was then waking about 11pm-12am, 2am, 4am and 5am. My husband said he wanted to try night weaning, so we just picked the most recent bank holiday weekend, and my husband went on every wake up and cuddled and rocked him back to sleep.

I said if he was getting upset, I just wanted to feed him as normal and we'd try and get rid of a feed at a time. However he was perfectly happy with a cuddle and woke about the same amount for the first 3 days, then started sleeping until 3am, and the last two nights has slept until 6am. I would suggest your husband tries different methods of getting her back to sleep like rocking, singing, patting etc, and you stay well out the way. If she's happy to be settled like that, get him to do it for at least a couple of weeks so she's in the new routine of not having milk at night before you do any night wakes again.