baby wont drink milk now weaning

[loreli]

Hi

does anyone have a similar experience? I have weaned DS very slowly from 17 weeks (I followed your baby week by week book from birth and it is the best!) He is nearly 6 months and loves food, I have cooked everything myself and he has had practically every fruit and veg going as well as baby rice and oats. However he is refusing to have any milk feeds now. I dropped him from 5 feeds to 4 two weeks ago and this seemed to work but for the past three days he has only drank about 30mls a feed and I have had to add his formula to his food to try to get it in to him. I am now panicking as I am going to Greece on hols next week and am scared he will get dehydrated. He refuses water and today I even added a bit of sugar free juice (after swearing that I never would!) just to try to get fluids into him but he would have none of it. Has anyone else had this problem. The books all say they should have 600ml/pint a day until they are one - HOW??? Surely if they are having three meals a day how can you get that amount of milk in them too?

could he possibly have an ear infection? if he has he wont want to suck on the teat as it will hurt. Could also be his gums (teething?)or possibly thrush.

We have had numerous bouts of thrush and DD always goes off her bottles.

ok my thoughts :

1 - try only offering 3 feeds.... I remember when dd was small once she was up to having 3 full meals a day she quite quickly dropped to 2/3 feeds

2 - my ds was a bugger for getting to drink water he's now nearly 8 months and loves it... however thats only come in the last month! I made up beakers with 90 ml water / 10ml proper apple juice just to sweeten slightly and he would drink sips.... over time he finally got the hang of it and now has no juice in it

3 - yoghurts etc are fab - they do need around a pint of milk based calcium (or some other weird wording) so if for eg he only wants 2/300ml then yoghurts / cheese sauce etc will sort the rest ;)

4 - teething ? he's the right age, the teat could be annoying him? maybe try giving him some ashtons 10 mins before a feed?

There's some good advice here and I won't repeat it all, but don't get too hung up on getting your LO drinking milk - as a friend once told me, weaning is about getting them onto solids and off milk. As long as there is milk/cheese/yoghurt in food (and you can use whole milk instead of formula after 6months), they are probaly getting enough. Remember, be guided by your baby - is he happy? looking healthy? Some babies take to food early and others rely on milk for longer.