Bottles at Night

This sounds like either a growth spurt or a bad habit, maybe a combo of the both. Have your tried uping her bedtime bottle to 8oz? More food in her belly means she'll last longer at night. Aslo, try giving her water or very watered juice in the middle of the night. If this is a bad habit, then it won't be worth her waking up for anymore after a while. Or you could just leave her be when she wakes up. It may end up being a power struggle but you have to remember you are the parent and you create the rules of the house, not the kids.

Good luck!
S.

Hi C.,
I'd quit the bottles at night immediately. I know a mom who did the wrong things with her kids teeth--shear ignorance on her part--and her kids had to have oral surgery to pull and fix the teeth they still had left. This is why I never do bottles with bedtime, don't give my kids Kool-Aid OR juice, except for special events and make sure that my kids teeth get brushed every day. That said, I agree with one of these other moms, if your daughter is hungry in the middle of the night at 9 months, she needs to eat more food before bedtime. You didn't say if she was eating "real" food. By nine months, my boys were both eating a variety of vegetables and cereal, sometimes mixed together. I made all my own baby food and never bought any at the store. I didn't use any special equipment, just a blender. And the food froze well once I made it. My kids were eating broccoli and sweet potato, yellow squash etc. You can talk to your doc about this, if it makes you more comfortable.

We were also pretty big on letting our kids cry it out to get to sleep. It worked really well for the oldest. After about a week, he was asleep within a minute or two.

More power to you, C.. Parenthood isn't a science, but there is some good science to know. E.

How old is she? you may just have to give her a sippie cup of water to ease her over, and about the bad habits my son slept with us until he was 4 so don't worry about creating bad habits she will soon enough out grow that stage and she be fine my son did and now he is almost 7 and sleeps just fine upstairs by himself, she is only this small once ya know just hang in there and try the water thing that worked with Jason

She may just be getting hungry in the middle of the night. It seems like about every three months they throw a monkey wrench into the "routine", usually like messing with their sleep or eating schedule. Will she let you give her the bottle and hold her til she falls asleep then take it away and put her back in her crib? Maybe she needs a little extra snack before bedtime to hold her through the night?

As she now has some teeth and more to come, after the night bottle give her a small bottle of water to cean her teeth for thenight. In the middle of the night just give her some water in the bottle, not milk. You may want to move that last bottle of milk a little before bedtime where she may begin to sleep all night without wetting. V.

I think our babies may be going through a phase. I have a 9 month old as well, and he was sleeping through the night until last week. Now he wakes up anywhere between 2 and 4:30 for a bottle. I have a 3 year old, and I've been trying to remember what he did. I don't think we had this problem, but we used to wake him when we went to bed around midnight to change his diaper and give him a bottle so we could sleep uninterrupted until about 7. We haven't done that with baby #2 because he tends not to go back to sleep when he's woken up, and our schedules have changed for a variety of reasons.

My baby has his 9 month dr's appt today, so I'm going to ask about this. I have to say I'm sick of it! He gets plenty to eat all day -both food and bottles -and I thought we had successfully dropped our middle-of-the-night feeding.

I will say that I intentionally always put mine to bed with a bottle containing rice cereal. That has always been what got them to start sleeping through the night. Around a year it is the last bottle we "drop".

I hope that you started giving her baby cereal, fruit and vegetables when she was 6 months old. Since she is 9 months, she can now have baby meats(all of them), all of the cereals, all of the fruits and all of the vegetables. The baby food should help her make it through the night without a bottle. Good luck!