Possible sources of help for you:
this forum (but we would need more information, such as daytime nap schedule, recent milestones such as crawling, standing up, daytime activity level, temperament, etc.)
your baby's doctor
breastfeeding support group in your area
I didn't understand "We decided breastfeeding was necessary." It would be helpful to know what the patter was before you made that decision.
It is generally possible to night-wean a breastfed baby at 9 months. However, it generally won't work if baby can smell Mama. The other parent and baby need to sleep in a separate room from Mama during this process.
The gentle way to night-wean is to remove one feeding at a time. For example, suppose baby is in the habit of nursing at 11 pm, 2 am and 4 am. You would pick either the 2 am or the 4 am nursing to eliminate first. Suppose it's the one at 2 am. Here's how you would do it. Mama would nurse at 11 and put baby to bed in the room where Papa is happily snoring. Then she'd go to bed in the room where she's going to sleep. Baby wakes up at 2, cries for Mama (who is using ear plugs and white noise). Papa sings and walks and baby goes back to sleep. When baby wakes up at 4, Papa delivers baby to Mama and goes back to bed in the other room.
If baby's weight is good and he is eating and nursing well during the day and evening, it should be possible to go from 11 pm to 6 am without nursing at 9 months. The night-weaning process can take up to two weeks but usually is quicker than that. Papa will need afternoon naps until the process is complete.
Once the process is complete baby will be able to sleep in the same room with both parents again (if those are the sleeping arrangements you prefer).
Sources: La Leche League books and meetings; books by William and Martha Sears, personal experience.
So let's see if I've understood your update. 9 mo old baby sleeps either two or three daytime naps. First nap mid-morning, short, but sometimes you stretch it longer. If first nap is short, he has two more naps, otherwise second nap is at about 5 pm. Doesn't like meat or vegetables. Baby was partially weaned a couple of weeks ago because he was driving you guys nuts with crazy frequent nighttime nursing.
Well, one possible explanation is that your baby is not neurotypical and not a good sleeper. Hard to tell at this distance!
Let's assume otherwise. Here are some suggestions (which you are free to ignore). Obviously these are just ideas to try.
Make sure baby only naps twice in one day. Aim for the afternoon nap to be the major nap, i.e. don't stretch the morning nap. However, feel free to do the stretching out thing in the afternoon. (In approximately 3 months you will probably want to guide baby to sleep only one nap per day, in the afternoon, see Dr Spock's Baby and Child Care.)
Reduce the bottles. (At this point it might be difficult to go off bottles entirely cold turkey.)
Don't put any cereal in the bottles.
Eliminate the cookies. Reduce the bread. Make plenty of other foods available. Sneak homemade purée of cooked chicken or soft tofu into some other food that baby likes (perhaps puréed cooked carrots?). I was struck with the limited repertoire of foods your baby is experimenting with. Besides all the obvious reasons to try to expand his repertoire, another good reason is to prevent allergies from developing later.
I hope baby is in a high chair playing with food during meal times, for example, peas, small pieces of foods, to have fun with, whether they go into his mouth or not.
Go to bed early with baby (in the evening).
Go ahead and night-wean him now. We were inspired to do this by our La Leche League leader who had done it with her babies, and we tried it ourselves with baby #2. I'm not saying all babies can handle this (our #1 wouldn't have been able to, he was EXTREMELY needy), but I think most can. Now that I've read your description I think that it might be worthwhile to go ahead and do this less gradually than what I described above. This would be Papa's job. It's not easy. Lots of walking and singing and crying. It really can't be in the same room with Mama. The process could take from 3 days to a week, probably.
(The alternative to this is for Mama to learn to nurse lying down dozing. It helps for her to lie on her side, with a cylindrical pillow stuffed at her back so she can stay propped on her side, but completely relaxed. Now this works great for some mothers but not for everybody. Many mothers are just not able to sleep properly with the fiddling and the breast stimulation.)
- If there is any concern about milk supply, Mama can increase her milk supply by using a supplementer (either Medela or Lact-aid, we used Lact-aid personally, but I understand Medela is quite similar). In fact, by taking this approach you could in principle eliminate the bottles entirely if you wanted to go that route.
Note, if you want to try him out with sleeping in another room, either now or later on but are feeling anxious that he might cry too much and work himself into a state before you are awake enough to go to the other room, use a baby monitor, for your own peace of mind. That way you can respond pretty promptly but he's still getting the hang of sleeping somewhere else. That method is used by many people, although I will say that we did not take this approach at our house. We felt that it was a lot less hard on us to help baby during the night if he was close by. Our bed was on a low futon platform, and baby was sleeping on a thin crib mattress on the floor right next to the big bed. Well, that's just us, you don't have to do it that way.
I will explain about the naps. If there's too much daytime napping, it's hard to have a proper "night". On the other hand, if baby doesn't nap, and gets overtired, life is hell!
I would try very hard not to allow a nap to begin later than 4 pm. A 5 pm nap is going to be very confusing.
So, those are my ideas, feel free to comment or ask a question; I look forward to the next update.
