Night Weaning Deserves a Quiet Night
(because mom and dad need some more R.E.M. sleep)

At nearly a year old, Nuri was still waking twice on a good night to nurse (often more though), waking mom and dad. I honestly thought before I became a parent that most children gave up their night feedings voluntarily at an age of around 6 months but not more than a year. Well I'm sorry to say that I hardly know any parents whose children are like that and my son is certainly no exception! Even children who don't wake at night to nurse/eat often wake for other reasons with other needs until they are about 3 years old, according to many parents I've talked to.

So that brings us to last week. Not having slept more than 3 straight hours since my son was born, I decided it was time to night wean. We had tried weaning him off of these night nursings a couple of times before without much luck. We finally came up with a plan and stuck to it. Over the course of 5 nights, we bottle fed him increasingly diluted cow's milk until he was just on water.

The idea is to get his body used to getting those extra calories during the day. That's hard to do when you're a toddler because the world is so interesting during the day and who really wants to stop exploring to eat? Nuri is a very active little guy, so after he's "done" eating in his high chair, we still have to follow him around with a spoon for the rest of the evening while he plays, taking intermittent bites.

I am happy to say that our plan seems to have worked in some sense. Nuri doesn't get hungry any more from when he goes to bed until around 5:30 or 6 am. But unfortunately he caught a cold in the middle of all of this and he's still waking in the night with congestion. It's unclear whether he will start to sleep through once his cold goes away or not. Last night he woke only once between 9 pm and 5:30 am, which is the best record he has had yet. It seems it is indeed the end of the world as we know it and we feel fine.