Weaning from bottle

leebi07

My little ones currently have 3 bottles a day.  They drink from a sippy with water during meals.  They are doing great at using the sippy, but they love their bottles.  I have no idea where to even begin the process of weaning.  Any advice?

Also we got the ok to switch from formula to whole milk when they turn 1, which will be in a couple of weeks.  Is it better for me to switch cold turkey or mix the milk and formula and gradually lessen the amount of formula to get them used to it?  I would love to hear what others have done.

babybash

We did the same where we were down to three bottles and drinking water from the sippy.  I started wth their lunch and used a sippy with milk and it worked, I then went to dinner and last breakfast.  Mine did really well, I really thought the morning bottle was going to be really hard to break.  I also found that I had to do breakfast right away.  We transitioned within a few days and I was really happy to be done with bottles.

 We just switched to whole milk as well, I did half and half for a couple of days and then I was out of formula so I tried just whole milk and they haven't looked back.

Good luck  

jackieb3858

We dropped the afternoon bottles and kept the morning and bedtimes ones for a week. Then we dropped the nightime bottle and then the morning bottle. Like the PP said, we have to give breakfast right away though. They were pretty good about it, although they would only drink water from their cups for a week or so. We had to give them a lot of yogurt and cheese to make up for it. Just recently they started to drink enough milk from their sippys. We found the straw sippys to work best.

We did milk cold turkey, but looking back I probably should have mixed it. I guess you could try straight milk and then if they don't like it mix it. You could probably start mixing now so they are on all milk by the time they turn 1. I wish I would have done that.

Best of luck!

finallyreilly

We did a gradual switch to milk.  We started with 2 oz milk/6 oz formula and every week we increased the milk amount and lowered the formula until they were 100% milk - about 12 1/2 months.

 We kept the morning and evening bottles until they were about 13 months and then just had the evening bottle until they were about 14 months.  They were slow to catch on to the sippy cups so we had a slow transition.

GSwans2

I woudl highly recommend the gradual switch to milk.  It took 3 weeks.  Week 1 was 1/3 of thebottle was WCM, 2/3 was formula.  Week 2, 2/3 was WCM and 1/3 was formula, and Week 3 and on was entirely WCM.  They never batted an eye.