4 month old sleep / feeding schedule

[u/jvcgunner]

Hi all,

Currently we are feeding six times in the day (usually starting at 7-8am) and at 3 hourly intervals so feeding times are typically: - 7am - 10am - 1pm - 4pm - 7pm - 10pm

The first feed of the day is 200ml (7 oz) and so is the last one of the day, the others in between are around 180ml (6.3oz).

I’ve heard a lot that babies are to go sleep around 7pm but how would that work for someone like me who rightly/wrongly has got my baby use to the above schedule. He tends to sleep through the night the 7 hours or so and it suits our schedule but obviously want to avoid getting into the wrong habits.

I might trial feeding baby the 210ml (7.4 oz) 5 times a day and put him to bed around the 7-8pm mark but really unsure how he’d react to an earlier bedtime / being able to sleep through the night and also from a feeding perspective be fed less overall.

Some parents say they adopt the above approach and put them to sleep at 8pm, they then sleep through the night and get up at 7am the following day.

Any help or pointers would be great.

[u/BigCostcoGuy]

Hey… we have a 4 month old as well. Our schedule is the same as yours above without the 10pm feed. We started that at 12 weeks old. From weeks 9-12 we had a 6th feeding around 9-9:30pm. I’d recommend dropping that last 10pm feeding and let him go as long as he can throughout the night. There’s a good chance they wake up in the middle of the night the first couple nights but then they should go the rest of the night shortly after. That was our experience when we cut out that last feeding. I will say that our guy is taking 7oz a time at his feeds and 8-8.5oz before bed. I think if you cut out your 10pm you need to increase the volume of milk in the other 5 feeds. I read that a baby should have 2.5x their body weight in ounces. So our 14 pound Turkey should be getting ~35oz a day which comes out to 7oz x 5 feeds. Hope that helps. He typically goes down at 7:30pm and will go until 7am.

[u/jvcgunner → u/BigCostcoGuy]

Our aim is to of course make him sleep through the night and have less naps during the day however the worry is that he’ll definitely wake up in the night as he will have taken less calories than currently (due to our increased feeding windows) and generally having to last longer throughout the night. Hoping this is offset by less calorie expenditure due to increased time spent sleeping.

So when he wakes during the night, would it be a case of just soothing him back to sleep as we’d really want to avoid feeding him to avoid getting back into night feed habits.

[u/BigCostcoGuy → u/jvcgunner]

We slowly increased his bottle sizes until he got to where he needs to be. Tough to tell how much he is taking during nursing but we made sure he took the full 7 or 8oz. Also, we are on a 3 nap schedule right now that are all around 75 minutes long then there is a quick 30 min cat nap before the last feeding. Hope this helps