I just wanted to get some opinions from you fine ladies. DS stopped asking for night feeds when he was four months olds and started again at about six months. There is no clear pattern to it - occasionally he sleeps through, sometimes he feeds once around 11 or 12 and then sleeps through, sometimes he goes through till 4 or 5, sometimes he feeds at 11 or 12 and again at 4 or 5. He eats three good meals a day and has four breastfeeds in the day (except if he has fed at 4 or 5 in which case he only wants 3). The waking for feeds doesn't seem at all related to how well he has breastfed or the amount of solids he has taken. I know in theory that he shouldn't need feeding at night and part of me thinks that I need to start thinking about stopping the night feeds.
BUT the other part of me doesn't think that we have any of the traditional problems with night feeding. DS goes to sleep independently and does sometimes resettle himself if he wakes. He always finishes his night feeds wide awake and spends 10 or 20 minutes chatting to himself before going back to sleep. And, very occasionally, he is willing to be settled with a 5 minute cuddle instead of a feed. He has a very different cry when he wants a feed from the occasional times when he wakes for some other reason (such as having gone to bed overtired). The feed waking is more of a shout than a cry and if he does wake up properly crying then a feed doesn't settle him. DS did sort himself out between the ages of 4 and 6 months and I wonder if I just need to wait it out for him to sort himself out again, rather than pushing him. He's never really been the kind of baby that obeys any rules written in books. I think that if I stop feeding him then he won't stop waking and we'll end up replacing the feed with 40 minutes of miserable crying. DH says that I should keep on feeding him if it settles him easily. But he's not the one getting out of bed!
What have other people's experiences been?
Freddie
