Hi Everyone,
I am having a lot of problems with my 8 month old son at the moment with NW, EW, Short Naps and feeding 3hrly throughout the night, but i won't go into great detail about it here or this would be a very long post but if you want to read more you can at:
http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=181139.msg2060471#msg2060471, but today i am here to ask a Bottle Feeding Question.
Kieran has never slept through the night and still feeds 3hrly every night taking 7-8oz around 10.30, 1.30, 4.30 then wakes for the day at 6am and i have been trying to work out why for months and now i am wondering if milk could be the answer.
Kieran was 10.7lbs at birth and was always a hungry baby drinking 5-6oz every 2hrs from just a few weeks old so i was encouraged to start solids early so his milk intake would drop so since starting solid's at 3.5 months Kierans milk intake has gradually decreased and just lately it was suggested to me he needed more solids to sleep through the night so i have been gradually increasing his solids which has made his milk intake fall even more to 12-16oz a day at most. It has never worried me until i had a visit last night from my friend and her baby who is 5.5 months old (only 12 weeks younger than K) and she was saying that he isn't eating solids yet but she isn't worried as he is still happy and sleeping through the night but he drinks 5-6 full 8oz bottles a day (approx 40-48oz of milk a day) so she feels solids are not too far off, then i realised there is big difference between Kieran's 3-4 x 4oz bottles a day and his 5-6 x 8oz bottles a day even though Kieran is eating solids aswell, and then i spoke to another friend today who has just started weaning her 4.5 month old son and she said the same that even though he has started eating solids twice a day he is still taking at least 4-5 x 8oz bottles a day and then i started thinking is milk the problem??
So i looked back at Kierans daily logs for this week and on Saturday he drank 11oz of milk during the day & 21oz through the night, on Sunday he drank 13oz during the day & 21oz through the night but on Friday he drank 21oz during the day and through the night he only took 11oz, so it seems that when he doesn't drink a lot during the day he makes up for it at night!!. The problem is that he only drank that much on Friday because he had refused breakfast that day so had a few full bottles of milk that day instead of his usual 3/4oz but to test the theory i would need to cut back his solids for a few days so he increases the amount of milk he takes so im thinking of trying it out, but before i do i just wanted to check if not drinking enough milk could really stop him sleeping through the night, so do you think a lack of milk could be the problem?
It would make sense as to why he has never STTN as we where encouraged to drop his milk intake quite early on so he never got to the stage of drinking full 8oz+ bottles, and even now he never takes more than 4oz bottles during the day although he does drink 3 x 7/8oz bottles during the night.
Tracyx