When should I drop from 4 to 3 milk feeds?

[joanneg20]

I'm just interested to hear what others have done.

DS is 7 months old and formula fed. And at the moment has 4 bottles, plus 3 solid feeds - although often doesn't eat much solid food at breakfast.

So at the moment his milk feeds are approximately: 7.30am, noon, 3.30pm, 7pm.

I'm beginning to think I should probably drop the lunchtime milk feed soon so he just has 3 milk feeds a day. At what age did you all do this?

4 feeds strikes me as not very much at all/ At 7 months old, I'd be trying to squeeze another feed in so he has 5 a day/

ds dropped to 4 feeds at 8 months and went to 3 feeds at about 9 months. Wait till he starts cutting down on a feed and then you will know which one to drop. There is no need to drop anything now if he is not giving an indication that he wants to take less.

DD is formula fed now and within about 3 weeks of starting formula she went from 5 feeds to 4, dropping the wee hours feed on her own. So she feeds 7am, 11, 3 and 6.30.
She is 6.5 months old and we have been doing baby led weaning for a couple of weeks so she isn't getting vast amounts of solids in at the moment - I am not going to do anything with her milk feeds other than let her lead the way and when she starts not being interested in milk at her usual times then I will take that as the cue that she is eating more solids and needs less milk.

I would say that it is best to let the baby decide when not to have milk as it is the most important nutrition for them until they are 1. Solids just being an added extra really. Although I am sure some people might not agree.

I do however have a book that suggests giving half feeds at 11 and 3 (or in your case 12 and 3.30) when baby gets to 9 months. I don't agree with this myself, as I have said above, but thought I would throw it out there, for what it is worth.

Hopefully someone with more experience will be able to tell you what they did

We have only just moved from 4 feeds to 3 and ds is 10mo.
We used to do breakfast, mid morning, mid afternoon and bed. We stopped the mid morning one, swapping it for water and snack and he didn't bat an eyelid!
This was on hv's advice apparently ds was having about 50% more than he should have. Not that it was stopping him growing etc.
I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry yet.

Thanks everyone. Will keep them all for now then. I'd just started wondering as he has been taking a bit less recently at the late morning and mid-afternoon feeds so I wondered whether I was supposed to be merging them both into one bigger feed, if you see what I mean. But will stick with them for now.

My DS is 10mth and has 3/4 breastfeeds a day
6.30,10.30,2.30,6.30 typically xx