How to drop a night feed

[Hells]

Hi, this is my first post on the forum and I'm hoping to get some advice to help me encourage my 9week old ds to sleep for longer during the night, and, ideally drop one of the night feeds.
Our EASY routine is broadly 3 hourly at the moment , DS feeds 3 hourly sometimes half an hour less or more and has between 45 mins and 1.5hr napping for the remainder of the time. We have established a bedtime routine - he has a feed, quiet play, bath, another feed and then bed. He is normally in bed by 8pm and goes down relatively easily. He then often sleeps for his longest time, sometimes until 11 or even 12. When he wakes, I feed him again and he goes down to sleep straight away with no problem. After that he wakes up in 2.5 or at the max 3 hour cycles.  He is definitely waking for food, and once fed with go to sleep again quite quickly (within 20/30 mins) using shush pat. I am breastfeeding and he mainly has both breasts at each feed, 10-15 on each. We tend to do one formula feed at night either the 11pm or the 2am one. 

I really want to encourage him to shift his evening long sleep to the 12am-4/5am period so I'm not having to do 11pm; 2am; 5am; 730/8am every night. Can anyone offer any advice on how to do this? Am I expecting too much too soon from him? We had some feeding problems at the beginning - Ds had a tongue tie and silent reflux so he didn't out weight on v quickly at the beginning but we seem to have got over those problems now and I'm keen to get more sleep at night if I can!

Thanks for any advice.

[JRs mom]

I think you are doing great! I know I did a very similar schedule with my son and around 3 months he started sleeping for longer stretches.His stomach is still very small and breast milk is quickly digested so keep doing what your doing and when he is able to sleep longer he will! Hang in there momma He needs that milk to grow strong and is still young and needs more frequent feedings!

[Erin M]

Yes, probably not exactly what you wanted to hear, but my ds was the same too.  I think I had a post on BFing at one point "will he ever go longer than 3 hours?" or something to that effect.  What you can do one night, if you're feeling up for it, is settle him by any other means -- walking, bouncing, rocking, etc and get him back to sleep without feeding...and see if he wakes up again for a feed -- every time I tried that with my ds we'd do the up and down all night thing until I finally gave up and fed him --- he was just genuinely in need of a nf every 3 hours at that point.  He did eventually stretch out and these days sleeps really well! 

[Hells]

Thanks so much for the encouragement and advice. At 11 weeks he has now started to sleep for longer and these past few days has actually dropped a feed of his own accord! he's still waking at 2 or 3 am but then will go down again until 6 or 7 - bliss!

[Ernest's mum]

That's encouraging to read. Thanks for sharing.

[Erin M]

Excellent!  Nothing wrong with an easy NF at 11 weeks.