Trying to eliminate night time feeding, end up waking hungry very early

Question

We got a 9-month old son that's been rocked to sleep and given many night time feedings to help him sleep. So those are two sleep associations that we are trying to eliminate. We have been working to erase the feedings first since last week using some of Ferber's methods. We increased his before-sleep bottle from 150ml to 200ml and baby now sleeps anytime between 8:30-9PM to 5AM with just a few short wakings without needing to feed. The problem is sometimes he wakes up really early now at 4:30-5AM, while his usual wake time is 7-8AM, and usually because he's really hungry. We can tell he's hungry because we rock him for 15-30 minutes and he's still cranky. After we give him a 100 ml bottle then he goes back to sleep and we wake him up at 8AM.

My questions are what can we do to eliminate this 5AM feeding, and does this feeding counts as "night time feeding"?

Thank you

Answer 1

You did it very well by changing the pattern in feeding, it is just that the baby is still used to be fed quite often.

From what you comment, your baby used to eat several times during the night, say every 3-4 hours. Now he sleeps for 8 hours in a row and then wakes up feeling hungry: that is completely normal! Just feed him normally at that time for a while. After few days, he may prefer sleeping a bit more and that feeding will move from 5AM to somewhere around 7AM.

In general, what I learnt from my 10 months old daughter is that you should make changes one at a time. Once that one is fixed, go ahead with the next one. This way, you can almost certainly know what is wrong when you make a change.

Going back to your question, just try to be patient. Your baby needs to get used to the change and it has to be done in a more progressive manner.

Answer 2

You are on the path towards blissful sleep, don't worry it will come! I agree with Fedorqui on trying one thing at a time.

My suggestion which has worked for us (I have an 11th month old who is sleeping through the night 7:30- 6:00) is to increase your son's food consumption during the day. I am not sure where your son is with eating purees and/or solids, but what we did was increased the purees to two 4oz feedings during the day in addition to the milk he was consuming (this was at 9 months). Then he would have solids at home for dinner and I would nurse him before bed.

This routine really helped a lot. He did wake at night for a while and my husband would go in to hold him so he would get the comfort but not the milk. After a while he started sleeping through the night. I am starting to feel like a normal person again instead of the sleep deprived version of myself.

Hope this works for you too!