Moving to cow's milk

[BlingLoving]

DS is about to be 1 and his bottles are all still formula. He does drink a lot of water, and now and again has some fruit juice or milk with his cereal etc. He is still having four bottles a day although the two middle ones are relatively small.

We are getting ready to convert to cows milk but I don't think he should have four bottles a day. Does it make sense to offer him cows milk morning and and formula during the day? I'm going to try and get him down to three bottles in the next few weeks.

Hopefully someone more experienced will come along and answer you. AFAIK if your LO is having a good varied diet, there is no need to continue with formula. Friends who are ff switches to cow's milk in a bottle for the morning and night feeds. But since you are still on 4 bottles, I assume you should be switching slowing, and not suddenly all 4 bottles changed to cow's milk on day 1?

I'm bf, and 14mo DD only has a feed when we wake, and another at bed time. She is offered cows milk in a cup during morning snack, but tbh, she doesn't drink much at all. So I think it's definitely ok to start removing the day time bottles.

Thanks. He gets so miserable if he doesn't get them. He'll happily drink water at meals, but mid afternoon and mid morning he wants his milk. Morning one helps him go down for a nap and afternoon one if we forget it he gets more and more unhappy until we give it to him. But he has to start cutting back. I think I'll use the summer to work on it.

Does he actually want formula or just the bottle? You could use cow's milk in bottle to cut down the faff in preparation. (Or maybe I'm a bit lazy since I had only use pre-made carton formula ). I hear from friends with older children that it's very very hard to remove the bottles especially the morning and bedtime ones. And hence why they use cow's milk in bottles.

I don't see a need to actually remove the bottle if that's what help him to sleep. As long as you understand prolonged sucking on teats can promote tooth decay, and never give him a bottle of juice to suck on while walking around town in a buggy! (I'm amazed how many parents actually do it).

Well, I'm more concerned that it lands up being too much cows milk. Totally get the prolonged sucking thing, but not worried about that - he drinks it down in about 2 minutes (no prolonging here, I can assure you) then spits it out and passes out!

Do you give him a snack in the afternoon?

He has a small snack but nothing substantial. Are you thinking that's the problem? Very interesting idea actually.

Well I was just wondering if he was simply hungry and took the milk for that, DD tends to have an apple or other fruit, some cheese, maybe some raisins or similar, and maybe a lassi, if DP is not around as she normally as 1 bf in the afternoons if she is. However she doesn't need the drink (would have water) but would get cranky if she wasn't offered any food at all between lunch (12-2ish and dinner (6:30ish)

DD is ebf though, so there's been no question of moving to cow's milk from formula, we just introduced milk and lassis as another drink, mind you she never seems to care what she eats or drinks.