Dropping the last night feed

[michaelschumacherismygod]

Hi, my DS is now 7 months and is only having one feed a night now. I would be quite happy to keep doing this but it does now seem that he does not really need it as often he is not hungry at breakfast. I was just wondering what methods people used to cut this last feed.

We do not dream feed - I just feed him when he wakes. Until last week it did seem to be hunger that was causing him to wake - but have now started to give him more food during the day, so I dont think he is really hungry. He can settle himself after this night feed - although at nap time he sometimes has a dummy which I take out when I put him in the cot (he is not fully asleep)and is often very drousy when I put him down at bedtime after his bottle.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

I haven't done this yet as DD is too young, but advice I had from a sleep consultant about dropping night feeds is to wait until they aren't very hungry at breakfast and then start cutting down the night feed until they are having a full breakfast. I BF-ing so she said to cut it down by 3 mins for 3 days, then if she still wasn't having full breakfast another 3 mins until she's not having anything. Then just soothe back to sleep until she stops waking. I guess with a bottle you'd reduce an Oz at a time in the same way?

Hopefully someone with more experience will post...

bump

when you say the last night feed - what time are we actually talking about?

Can be anytime from 11.30 - 2.30 generally. I don't wake him up - a dream feed never worked for us - would not have much at 11pm and then wake later anyway.

When DS 2 was on three meals a day I decided that he was ready to drop all his night time feeds.

So now he has his last bottle of the day after his bath at approx 7.30pm and the next one when he wakes at approx 6.30am

As he sleeps on his front when he woke I just patted his back and 'shushed' him until he went back to sleep.

If he got really angry I gave him the dummy to suck on.

But I didn't pick him up or give him a drink of water.

I needed to do this for 3/4 nights and then he got the idea and would kerfuffle and put him self back to sleep, and now (a couple of months later) he very rarely wakes and will sleep 10-11 hours.

I did exactly the same with DS 1 the only difference was that he took a bit longer to get the idea maybe 6 or 7 nights.

You just have to hope that this doesn't coincide with a new tooth or illness.

she dropped the middle of the night feed at 15 weeks. we used to wake her for a dream feed around 10 but we dropped this at around 7-8 months by dropping an oz out of the bottle every couple of days until it was down to 3oz then we dropped it completely and it worked. I could tell that she didn't really need that bottle as she was only drinking half of it or so and it wasn't affecting her sleep but it was affecting the amount of milk/breakfast she was having in the morning.