9 month old back to night feeds

[MadeInChelt]

Help please - what should we do? Has anyone else had this?

Long post - sorry!

DC was sleeping through the night from 3 months. We recently moved her in to her own room. It was going well but one night she didn’t settle until 10pm and we’ve been out of sorts since. Despite my best to get back to a routine she wakes almost every night at 4am and will not settle until she has milk. She is waking at other times before 4am but usually a cuddle back to sleep works. We’ve tried more milk during the day but she won’t accept it. She has a total of about 750/850ml during the day. It also means she’s waking up much later in the morning so totally throws her usual schedule off whack and later bedtime too.

She also has solids for breakfast and lunch but doesn’t yet actually consume much of these - just lots of mouthing, chewing and spitting back out (which we’re happy with at this stage - we’ll go at her pace).

im thinking of the following:
a) offer food at lunch too (was going to wait until she actually eats and swallows more food to do this though)

b) try offering an extra oz of milk between usual feeds.

c) waking her up 6:30/7am regardless

She’s going to nursery in two weeks and would like to have a routine to pass on to the nursery manager but at the moment she’s all over the place.

Any suggestions?

How long has this been going on? Could just be a regression. What time does she go to bed?

I’d say waking at 4am for milk is probably pretty typical behaviour, you may just have to suck it up for a while unfortunately! Which I know is horrendous advice, but IMO sometimes the best thing you can do is accept a situation instead of driving yourself mad trying to change it. I know mine went through a phase of waking early because of hunger, and plenty of friends have moaned about it too.

I agree with previous PP unfortunately. You have my sympathy as my 8 mo has been having 3 milk feeds a night for a couple of months now! He was sleeping better when he was younger, it is tiring. He's my second child and a much worse sleeper than my first as a general rule.

I don't think there's any point in trying to change things right now with the imminent nursery start either. Chances are your baby will get into their own nursery day routine which may not be the same as their routine on the days tjehre not at nursery or at least that's what happened to my DC1 who started nursery at 9mo. They were fine, nursery went with them when they wanted to nap etc which was totally random, they just watched her cues. She hardly napped there tbh and was extremely overtired but she coped ok nonetheless and as she grew older it became less of an issue as she needed less sleep. Starting nursery will be a huge change for baby and may alter his nighttime sleep anyway, so I really wouldn't bother trying to change anything before he's settled in there.

Chance are as baby grows and starts eating more solids they are likely to sleep better without the need for the milk. Or that's what I'm telling myself about DC2 haha.

Aw thank you both thats very reassuring. It’s only been about 3 / 4 weeks and just frustrating when she slept so well through the night previously. She is having a growth spurt so I can’t wait until she’s properly consuming her solids too!

I’ll just suck it up for now - I was thinking when I posted it that nursery is going to really throw things up in the air anyway and that not far away now.

Thank you!! Feeling better now we’ve had a nap too.