High Maintenance Mom

We weaned B from a bottle around 14 or 15 months to help him get ready for his new room at daycare. Baby Entropy just gave up his bottle at about 15.5 months. In both cases it was exciting to move all the bottles out of the kitchen and in both cases I was scared about the kids continuing to sleep through the night. Luckily, like everything else, kids adapt and it was probably harder for me than it was for them...

There are many stories on the web about weaning from a bottle that have more to do with sleep issues than the bottle. Thanks to the advice of one of my cousins, our kids learned to put themselves to sleep at an early age (both boys slept 11 to 12 hours at night by 12 to 13 weeks). We followed the BabyWise "Eat, play, sleep" method, see Advice books for the pregnant moms) so both kids were put into their cribs awake. B rarely had feedings right before bed but I gave Baby Entropy bottles before bed for two months because he was so small. I was happy to get the extra food (milk) into him but scared I was giving him a habit that I would have difficulty breaking.

Both kids started solids early - B around 5 months and Baby Entropy around 4.5 months because they were waking in the middle of the night. Both boys also sleep with water cups and I often hear them drinking in the middle of the night. Tonight I gave Baby E a First Years sippy cup (see Removal of tab from First Years sippy cups for my rant on these cups) and while I was getting his toothbrush he opened the cup (no tab, he uses his teeth) and dumped water all over himself and the sheets and blanket I had just changed. Getting back to the story about his bottle, I was fearful to get rid of it because I thought he wouldn't sleep through the night. We replaced his lunch bottle with a sippy cup first, then his morning snack bottle. The three bottles left were the morning bottle, the 5:00 "I'm having trouble making it through the day on one nap" bottle, and the night time "let's get more calories into the baby" bottle. We switched the morning bottle to a sippy cup once we saw he was eating breakfast. It was recommended that we not drop the 5:00 one right away because he seemed to need it so we dropped the night one. I gave him a sippy cup for about a week and then stopped giving him the sippy cup without any problem. The 5:00 bottle was dropped around the same time at school.

B had a slightly different weaning experience. While Baby E will drink over 24 ounces of milk a day if we let him, B had no interest. It was scary to take the bottle away because B wasn't really using his sippy cup but we didn't have a choice or maybe it never occurred to us that he didn't need to give up his bottles at home, only those at school. So we gradually introduced the sippy cup and then around 15 months took a leap and gave him only the sippy cup. He was probably drinking about 10 - 16 ounces of milk so we made sure he had lots of yogurt and cheese.

It's always amusing how something seems so difficult or scary, and then a few weeks later a new routine is in place and the old routine feels so distant.