how to drop the night feed...

[Kerri28]

hello all, my dd is 13 weeks old and is a very good sleeper. she is ff. she goes to bed at around 7:30 and has dream feed at 10:30pm she used to wake at 2:30am for a feed and then sleep til 7:30. after a month of this i gradually "pushed" her feed time until 3:30am (by pushed i just used her dummy and stroked her face until she slept again). She is currently waking between 4 an 4:30 then sleeping til 8.

Yesterday (after a formula change to nutramigen which i think made her more comfortable) she slept until 5:30!!! hooray!!!

i am due to go back to work in march, when dd is 6 months so i'm hoping she's mostly sleeping through by then.

so my question is, how do i achieve this?

do i make her go cold turkey and cut out the night feed? if so, when?

or do i keep "pushing" her feed until later and later until i'm at about 6:30 (cos thats the time i will get up for work)

or will she naturally just drop the early feed?

or does anyone else have any suggestions/criticisms of my plan?

i know it's early days and i'm not too worried now cos i can catch up on my sleep, but i think it would kill me to work AND get consistently no sleep.... please help!!

oh, and when she does take her bottle in the night she always drinks a lot cos she is obviously very hungry, although i m gradually reducing the amount i give her too - currently down to 4oz from 6oz. is this a good idea or not?

My dd just naturally dropped the night feed - not sure exactly how old she was, but a bit older than your dd. She did the same as yours - got to 5.30 then it just got later and later and she now sleeps until about 7/7.30am after her 10.30pm feed and isn't gasping for food when she wakes in the morning. Don't push it too hard - it will just happen and you've loads of time before you go back to work!

I wouldn't drop it yet, personally - but then I had a littly who gained weight very poorly. I did drop it at just over 9 months because she was having terrible constipation problems, with a bleeding anal fissure, and the GP told me to. I did the gradual withdrawal, watering it down. (I guess I wouldn't do that with an unweaned baby?) It made no difference to her sleep. HTH.

I'm in the same position with my sixteen week old charge. Have got Doc's permission to up his formula by 20mls through out the day. He had his dreamfeed at 11pm, then wakes between 4 - 6am, if he wakes before 5.30am he can have 60mls formula but if he wakes after then he gets water. Hopefully with him increasing the formula he'll sleep through. But if not I'll do water for a few days and then if no improvement will do cold turkey - he sucks his thumb so don't need to worry about a dummy. He's very clever this morning after waking at 4am he then woke again just after six, so I said "i'm not getting up now", and he went back to sleep for an hour.

This will be first charge where they have not slept 7 -7 at this age, so am not expecting him to be off the dream feed either by the time i leave two months.

My ds2 is 10 months and breastfed and still wakes 3-4 times a night plus in the evenings, I've love a magic answer after 10 months of severe sleep deprivation!

thanks guys, but damn, was hoping for a magic answer to . i am heartened by your post though nannynz when you said "this will be the first charge where they have not slept 7-7 at this age". Am hoping that over the next 3 weeks my dd will decide to sleep 7-7!!! (highly unlikely though!)

good luck increasing his formula by 20ml throughout th day, my dd goes all tight lipped when i try to get more food in her than usual!! stubborn? must take after her mum

He's very clever this morning after waking at 4am he then woke again just after six but he's only 16 weeks he hasn't got the ability to be 'clever'.

I really don't buy this 'stuff them up during the day' thing. If I over eat at lunch it doesn't make me less hungry later in the evening. These are tiny babies with tiny stomachs. Milk digests very quickly and they need it to grow, they're doing an awful lot of growing and developing at this age. If they drop it naturally fair enough but if they're waking because they're hungry then keep going. I sometimes wake because I'm thirsty too and if someone denied me a drink I'd be waking frequently until I got one.

Keri, you will cope you just do. Your DD will also change her sleep / feed patterns any way even if you do nothing. Believe me I've gone to work on very little sleep but you get through it.

gingerninja - i was only saying he was 'clever' tongue in cheek. I realise that he doesn't have the ablility.

after talking to doctor though he said that with his weight he could be having 1000mls a day, and I was going on what the info on the can said and only offering just over 900mls - so he was hungry when waking. He had two 200mls bottles yesterday and then slept at 6.45, had dream feed and then slept until just after six! I went to get his bottle and when I returned(about five mins later) he was asleep again and slept until nearly 7.30am. It's not as though I'm forcing milk down his throat he is really hungry for it.

keri - you can only do what you feel comfortable with and you know what's right for your baby and family.

Sorry nannynz I just get a bit annoyed about the expectations we have for tiny babies to sleep and not feed when their instinct is to do the opposite. It's perfectly natural and we don't recognise that enough but see it as an inconvenience.

Ok....now I need to ask. I have got an 8 week old who was 10lbs when born and now weighs over 12lbs. I would love to eliminate the 4am feed but not sure how. He feeds every 3-4hrs at any time of the day. He will have 6oz but sometimes only finish between 3 and 5. Also in between feeds he wakes a few times but is worse in the morning hours. After the 4am feed he will sleep for about an hour and then wake every 10 mins because he dropped his dummy and cant seem to be able to go back into a deep sleep...
Please help...
Thanks

i think a dream feed and 1 night feed is amazing for a 13 week old.

My little girl is 10 months old and has just dropped the dream feed herself - refusing it completely (she was very slow to gain weight and prem so She needed it a lot longer than most) She was about 14 1/2lbs when she dropped it.

Couple of options IMO

1. Cluster feed in the evening, so for example feed at 5pm, 8pm and 11pm.

1. Start reducing the amount of formula given in the middle of the night feed. Gradually go from say 5oz right down to 1oz, put a smaller teat on it (i.e my DD uses size 3 in day so I used a size 2 on midldle of night bottle) so that they do actually suck for longer therefore is more of a soothing effect. Eventually I could just put her dummy in and she accepted that.

I tried doing both together when DD was 13 weeks old and 3 weeks later she is going from 11pm until atleast 7am if not nearer 8am - hurrah!!

Do you mind me asking how much formula does your DD get through in a day? Somedays DD gets through 40oz which seems rather a lot for a 15 week old?!