In the next few weeks we’ll be adjusting the feeding/eating schedule we keep with Hugo as he is getting older. At the moment we roughly adhere to the following:

• 7:00AM: bottle
• 8:00AM: breakfast
• 11:00AM: bottle
• 12:30PM: lunch
• 5:00PM: dinner
• 6:30PM: bottle
• 11:00PM: bottle

and we’re going to be dropping the 11:00PM bottle in the evening.

We’ve had to go through these adjustments previously as we stretched out feeding durations and subsequently dropped bottles from the strict four hour feeding pattern when he was a new born. However, Hugo has been in a feeding routine related to the above now for many months, so dropping the evening bottle isn’t going to be a complete walk in the park.

Last night was our first attempt/test at dropping it and it wasn’t completely successful. Without any issue, Hugo slept through 11:00PM when I’d normally wake him up for his evening bottle. At that stage, I thought it was going to be smooth sailing, however at approximately 1AM he woke up again.

After thinking about it a little more, Claire and I think that we might need to gradually reduce the bottle instead of just stopping it cold turkey as he has no doubt become so used to it. This week we’ll reduce the volume of the 11:00PM bottle down from 250ml and continue that for a few days, maybe up to a week. It’ll continue to be reduced until we’re not giving him enough that he’ll miss not having it, which might be around 100ml.

I’m not sure how long it’ll take, but with a little luck Hugo will be sleeping through within the next couple weeks.