Weaning question....

Hey
So they're down to 4 feeds a day now and it works like this:
7am - bottle and porridge
11am - bottle and veg mush
3pm - bottle, fruit mush and baby yoghurt
6.30pm - bottle and bed
and they have little snacks like bread sticks or rice cakes throughout the day.
I just wondering if i should be dropping the bottle at the 3pm feed and give them a sippy cup with water, as it's a bigger meal for them and they don't take so much of their bottle then anyway... they've been in this routine for a while and seem ok, but they're not finishing bottles so much now. they have 7oz bottles and maybe leave a couple of oz's each time....
does that sound right? they're 8.5 months now. just not sure what the next step is right now as they're definitely not ready to go down to 3 feeds yet...
thanks!

 

I would drop the 3pm bottle. I don't think you need to substitute water though. Water is filling too (or so says the diet I'm trying :ibiggrin: ).

 

I think the formula is more important than the snacks/solids that you are giving... why don't you check with your pediatrician to make sure that they are getting in the ounces of formula that they would suggest... breastmilk and formula has better nutrition than solids and at least here in the U.S. it is supposed to be the base of their diet for the first 12 months. solids are for testing and learning...

I would be inclined to suggest to drop the breadsticks and rice cakes instead of dropping a bottle. I didn't really add any "snacks" like that until closer to 15 months for ours...

Maybe their intake of formula is good enough for what they are taking in and then what you are doing is fine... I'd just ask your pedi what they recommend.

 

I would probably keep the bottle. If they are consistently eating only 5 ounces of it, for example, I would just start making 5 ounce bottles. At least they would still be getting some formula at that time, since the formula is really more important than the solids.

 

We dropped the lunchtime (11am) bottle first, but that was/is our bigger meal. We also seperated the third solid feed from the afternoon bottle feed (bottle at 2.30-3pm, tea at 5pm, bedtime bottle at 6.30pm).
If they are eating their food well then I would just give them as much milk as they want, like pp said make 5oz bottles if that's what they're drinking, and not worry about dropping a bottle yet.
As a general guide they should be getting around 600ml of milk a day (remembering you can count milk in food-I assume their porridge has a fair amount of milk) so it sounds like they're making that. Do you still have a nighttime feed or do they STTN?

 

Are you giving them their bottle and food all at the same time?? I always alternate bottles and food, since they are both filling.

At 9 months we were roughly doing this schedule:
10am ~ 8oz bottle
12pm ~ nap
1:30pm ~ solids (2 6oz jars of baby food and some "extra's" like gerber puffs, crackers, yogurt melts..etc ~ split between the 2 of them)
3:30pm ~ 8oz bottle
6:30-7 ~ solids
9:30-10 ~ 8oz bottle

We just now dropped the morning bottle and switched it to breakfast foods, with milk in a sippy cup. Then they get their sippy again for a few mins before they go down for a nap.

At our 9 month appt our dr had us add the supper feeding in, before that we still had 4 8oz bottles a day. But they were already starting to not eat as much at that 6:30-7pm bottle so it was a simple switch.

It also depends on their weights, my dd is a pretty big girl, so it was actually good to cut her formula intake back a bit since she was eating so much, and my ds was already not eating his bottle so I didn't really take away any of his formula intake, just added more solids in.