ditching the bedtime bottle?

same routine every night....
a little HBO classical baby during bath time (whomever is not in the bath) and then all lights go off, we hold the babies (or they sit in old infant seats if we're alone) then bottle....then bed. we also brush their teeth on the couch so they dont really fall asleep in our arms.

i am VERY nervous to ditch the bottle!! they look for them when they get out of the bath.

i know that we are 18mos now and it's probably time??
any tips on when and how you did this?

 

We just went cold turkey and did a sippie of milk before bath and some water in a sippie on our laps before bed. It went very well for us. They never missed them. Good luck, they may surprise you.

 

I had done it as part of our bottle dropping process (I dropped a bottle a week). The kids were fine with the bedtime bottle being gone. I offered a sippy of milk after dinner (about 1 hour or so after dinner and 1 hour before bed). They might pleasantly surprise you and do fine. Good luck!

 

The bedtime bottle was our last bottle as well and I was soooo nervous about it! We too had a defined routine and they always drank all 6 oz of their bottle then. Though by that point we had gotten away from rocking them in the nursery while giving them a bottle (thank goodness!). Instead we started giving them their bottle in the living room while we played a DVD (usually Classical Baby - they love the music one!). they would often times walk around while drinking from their bottle off and on. Well around 15 or 16 months we finally switched to a sippy...and they barely even noticed! They were already good at drinking from sippies for all their other meals. So now our routine is 7pm give them a sippy of milk while they watch a dvd, then brush teeth, then at 7:30pm we tell them its "nite nite time" and open the gate and they go running down the hallway to their nursery. There we let them play for 15 minutes with their lullaby music playing and only a dim tiny lamp on, and at 7:45pm we put them in their cribs wide awake and leave the room. They are almost always asleep by 8pm. I can't tell you how long we have waited for this nighttime routine! LOL Anyway, I say go for the nighttime sippy! I stressed about it beforehand WAY more than was necessary and in the end it was no big deal. Sure they didn't drink as much, sometimes only 3 or 4 oz, but they have never woke up hungry in the middle of the night or super early in the morning. GL!

 

we use straw cups. should i offer some straw cups of milk? usually they down the whole cup during meals, etc!

 

The bedtime bottle is always the first bottle I dropped with all 3 of my boys. My oldest dropped his at 4 months, and the twins were around 6-7 months. I didnt really transition to it, it was something that I found they no longer needed as they were eating lots during the day.