Bad Habits

We've started to try and break Jacob of two of his more entrenched habits - drinking his milk warm from a baby bottle and waking up several times during the night demanding same.

The latter habit is a relatively recently acquired one - ever since we put him and Sam in the same room, he's become an easily disturbed sleeper, requiring warm milk (in a bottle) to get him back to sleep. If memory serves, he got into this rut before, in Aug 2005 after a really bad teething session when it would take warm milk and calpol to get him back to sleep. This time, I guess I've been so worried about him crying on being denied milk, thus waking up Sam and then Doug, and consequently the whole house having no sleep, that I've given in far too easily.

What this means in practice is that I've been up at, say, 12.30am, 2.30am, 4am and 5am night after night, getting no appreciable sleep. I've been running on empty for a few months now.

However, I've noticed recently that Sam hardly stirs at night and doesn't require being picked up to go back to sleep. He mostly sleeps through Jacob's occasional nightmares and vomiting, so I've decided that the time is now to break Jacob of the milk habit. The other reason for wanting Jacob to stop drinking at night is that we're in the early stages of potty training and he can't be expected to stay dry through the night if he's got a bladder full of milk.

The other habit we're trying to break him of is drinking his milk out of an avent bottle and teat. I have tried numerous times to get him to stop this - I know that its bad for his teeth and I also think he's too big a boy to be doing something so babyish. However, in Jacob's world view, milk is drunk from a bottle and juice is drunk from a cup and ne'er the two shall meet.

I decided a while ago that once Sam is one in Feb and has no need for sterilised bottles or formula then he'll drink his milk from a cup. Having talked it over last night, we've decided that when that happens, we'll throw all the avent bottles out and that both of them will have to start drinking milk from a cup. That'll mean that Sam will have to get out of his bottle of milk at night habit, as well as Jacob - I know this is going to make life difficult for a while, but hopefully it'll be better in the long run.

I'll be telling myself that today as I struggle to keep awake - we denied Jacob his night-time milk last night and had three hours of him weeping and wailing in the small hours and occasionally getting up and coming into our room to plead his case in person. He did eventually get off to sleep, but I was so stressed after listening to him ("oh mummy, please, please") that it took me ages to get off to sleep.

Last time he got himself into this rut, we decided that we'd have to break him of it before Sam's birth; but just as we'd decided this, he sorted it out for himself and started sleeping through. I'm going to hope for similar miracles, but pragmatism tells me that it ain't going to happen.