Dropping bottles and timing meals

[breatheslowly]

DD is 8mo and has 4 bottles of milk and 3 meals a day. I am under the impression that we would like to be at 2 bottles and 3 meals plus snacks by 12 months. At the moment her first bottle is at about 5am. She does go back to sleep and she does sleep from 7.30pm, so I am not personally bothered about being woken, though it would be lovely if she slept straight until 7.30am. Then breakfast at 8.30 and alternating bottles and meals every 2ish hours until bedtime.

When we end up at 2 bottles a day, are these generally morning and evening? If so, then if she has a bottle at 7.30am (assuming that she eventually sleeps until then) there is no way that she will take breakfast at 8.30am. This is fine at home, but at nursery they tend to have breakfast about then. Am I wrong about the timing of milk and or meals or do I just not understand where we are heading?

Also do you just drop bottles or do you reduce the volume gradually?

Also just as an aside, what sorts of things do you feed as snacks - fruit, crackers anything else?

Hi breatheslowly - I'm not sure of the answer, but my DD is a wee bit older than yours (just turned 9months) and we're also still on 4 bottles of milk (6oz) and 3 meals a day, but i think that's fine. they still need about 20 ounces of milk a day (general guideline anyway).

her routine is generally -
7am/7.30am - wakes up, bottle
8am - breakfast
11am - milk
12pm - lunch
3pm - milk
5.30pm - dinner
6.30pm - bottle then bed
7pm - asleep by this time

However, there has been a couple of times this past fornight that she has only had 3 bottles of milk and she's been fine. For example, there were 2 days that she slept in until about 8am, and went a bit longer between milk feeds and so only had 2. Also, she is sometimes drinking less - tonight, for example, she only had 2 ounces of her bedtime bottle.

I think we let them guide us and they'll drop the bottles themselves, either by not asking for it or drinking less than usual. I'm still offering 6ozs per feed though - I'm not dropping it for her.

Would be interested to hear how other people are getting on...

PS - haven't really given snacks yet, but I always have rice cakes on me which are handy to feed her if we're out and about and she gets restless if I'm having a coffee or something, if you see what I mean.

Sorry, that should be - she slept in and went longer between feeds and only had 3 bottles (not 2 as I said above).

That looks a lot like DD's day. I think I find it odd that the milk and meals don't have to be evenly spaced. DD has 7oz bottles, but this evening for no obvious reason decided that she needed milk at 6.30 and 7.30 which was very confusing.