confused about sleeping through the night! advice wanted

[michelle89]

hey
for the past month we have been leaving ds longer between feeds at night, now we are starting to ween him we want him to sleep longer at night, but im confused!

at the moment we feed him solid food at 8:30pm and then a bottle at 12:30, and then feed him again at 6am.

we are going to start putting him to bed after his 8:30pm feed as now he is sleeping. we are going to start leaving him 6hours in the next few days but i dont know when to put him to bed, if i put him to bed at 8/9pm then his next feed will be between 2/3am! that isnt sleeping through the night, so we'd have to feed him at 12am-ish so he sleeps through the night until 6am, but on these websites they say put him to bed at 8am ish so do i wake him up for his feed at 12am? until he sleeps for 8hours ish we are going to have to feed him during night?

what do you mean you will leave him 6 hours? Put him to bed and feed him when he wakes for one whether that is 4,6 or 10 hours since his last one. What age is he anyway? DS never slept through till he was 8 months old and that was from 8pm till 6am. What are your timings for milk/solids? From 6 months ds's day was like this:

7am - milk
8am - breakfast
11am - milk
12pm - lunch
2.30/3pm - milk
5pm - dinner
7.15pm - milk
in the night till 8 months - milk

I stopped waking him for a late feed as I preferred to go to bed earlier and get some sleep before he woke for his night feed.

Looking at your other posts, I think your son is 19 weeks - is that right? This is a typical time for a growth spurt, so personally I would feed him milk in the night whenever he woke, as it is fairly likely he will really be hungry as he is growing so much

19 weeks is also a bit young to be doing sleep training to get him to sleep through the night - it is only officially recommended from 6 months (26 weeks only), as it is only then that most babies are ready developmentally. A lot of mums try a dreamfeed, so they put the baby to bed at 7ish, then give them a feed when they go to sleep so about 11ish. Perhaps that might be worth a try?

19 months is also very early for weaning. Food is not being digested and likely to make him hungrier or slow his weight gain if it takes up room that would've been taken up by highly digestible milk. If he's hungry, he'll wake more often to eat.

Sleeping "through" the night is defined as 6 hours of continuous sleep, regardless of which six hours those are. 8pm - 2am is bloody marvellous for a 19 week old. IMO you have unreasonable expectations and are likely to tear your hair out and wonder what you're doing "wrong" when you have a perfectly normal baby.