@allfree15 My goal was to breastfeed for a year and we were able to make that bench mark…after that, I started introducing cow’s milk during one of my normal breast feeding times. I forget how many times I was breast feeding per day at that time…but if it was 6 I subbed one milk bottle in the middle of the day (not at a nap time) first. I slowly cut back feedings one by one until I only had morning feed and bedtime feed left…one morning she didn’t try to nurse so I didn’t offer and we went about our morning. One night it was raining and I was snuggling her before bed and she just fell asleep….and that was it
I think this is close to the “baby led weaning” that I had been reading. To keep our night time routine, we give her cow’s milk during bedtime (still!) and brush teeth afterwards. Brushing teeth after cows milk is also a challenge so don’t worry about that too much right away! I know the goal is always to get the baby to sleep! Dentist said we could give the baby (after 1) a little water after the cows milk to help rinse the teeth if a brush isn’t viable at that age.
That’s the weaning side - getting her to sleep was a struggle at times. We just got more vigilant about using our hatch light to give visual indicators of : bath time, pj’s, milk time, teeth, story time, snuggles, mom out the door. We just did our best following sleep training advice without having the heart for cry it out.
Hope this is some help…it takes a while but having the consistent schedule helped us and she’s much better about it all now. Every baby is a little different, I hope yours lets you and her sleep soon! Hang in there it does get better