5 month old feeding at 4 or 5am, not hungry in morning, how can I help her to cut out this feed?

[lu9months]

my 5 month old DD wakes at 10.30 and at around 4am, I give her a small bottle feed (4 oz) and she is happy with this, and goes to sleep til around 7.30, but isnt at all hungry in the morning, taking only a couple of ounces. so I feel she doesnt really 'need' the night feed, is there any way to help her and me sleep through the night - I am really tired, since I often dont get back to sleep after the night feed.

I was thinking of starting a similar thread!! I feel your pain. DD is 6.5 months on solids, and breastfed, and is exactly the same so bumping for you...

My kids dropped their middle of the night feeds fairly early (6 weeks and 10 weeks), but the key was when they stopped feeding properly in the morning. When that happened we pushed their 10.30pm feed to 11.30pm (this was easy to do as we always had to wake them for this feed anyway) and that definitely helped. (we then brought it forward gradually over the next few months and they dropped it too by 4 1/2 months and started going 7pm-7am)

Anyway, initially they still woke in the middle of the night and first we tried settling them with some water (in case it was just thirst). This worked with my son for about a week and then he just stopped waking himself and went through to 7am. The water thing didn't work with my daughter and we just had to settle her another way as we realised she was waking out of habit more than anything else. It took 3 nights and a bit of controlled crying but it worked. 1st night it took about an hour, 2nd night it took about 20 mins and 3rd night it only took 5 mins before she settled herself again and went through til morning.

(both kids were bf by the way so this wasn't down to them being full from formula!)