How educated are you on the biomechanics of breastfeeding? This is absolutely perfectly normal for a breastfed baby and like any other things there are disadvantages and advantages.

The advantage of bottle feeding formula is that formula has an incredibly high amount of iron which slows the digestive system, leading a child to feel fuller longer because things are moving more slowly which in turn delays hunger waking. The downside is that formula does not contain melatonin or induce serotonin production so doesn’t assist in making a child drowsy nor does it allow the parent to have the most restful night feeding experience possible.

The advantage of breastfeeding is that breastmilk does contain melatonin. If you sleep topless, your partner can latch the child while you stay essentially entirely asleep. The act of nursing induces serotonin (and oxytocin) production which allows the body to get rested on lesser sleep. I am a breastfeeding Mom and peer counselor and often joke that during the day, nursing is full service, but at night, nursing is self-service. I will be topless, but kid has to do all the rest. And they do. I doze during the nursing sesh. I nurse flat on the bed in the side-lying position so that if I do fall deeply asleep, my child is in the best possible circumstances vs falling deeply asleep in a chair or on a couch where kid will fall and be trapped between me and an arm or something.

There are, of course downsides to breastfeeding and the fact that breastmilk is digested more quickly than formula means there is a shorter time to hunger returns vs formula. (However, the quick digesting is super helpful when they have a tummy bug as you won’t have to worry about dehydration.)

The least advantageous feeding setup is to have Mom bottle feed breastmilk during the night. Mom misses out on those useful hormones which multiply rest benefits as those only come from nursing, the pumped day milk doesn’t have melatonin so won’t induce sleepiness in kiddo, but will still digest quickly.

I have advice but you aren’t going to like it. The advice you might like is to obtain a copy of a book called “Sweet Sleep” and read it cover to cover. It contains the latest research-backed information about sleep, not just what some first wave behaviorists opined after doing experiments on dogs back in the mid century. (Sleep training is just dog training from the mid-century and does not, I repeat does not, has been studied and absolutely does not, and it has been repeatedly studied and documented that it does not reduce the number of wakes a child has. It just increases their distress.)

Here’s the advice you aren’t going to like …

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Your child is not going to reliably sleep through the night without waking for one reason or another until somewhere between age 3 and 4. And that is developmentally normal. Nothing in your story right now is wrong, bad, off, or worrisome. I’m sorry that you ever had expectations set to the contrary. Those people were cruel and the only possible result would be to make you think something was wrong with you and/or your child. There is nothing wrong. Your daughter is behaving exactly as is correct for her age.

And. It. Sucks. Because you need sleep even if she doesn’t. You need consistent night time sleep. And you aren’t able to get that need met because your daughter is growing up exactly right. Two things can be true at the same time.

Day time sleep has an effect on night time sleep but ONLY after age two. She’s not that old yet. Mess with her day time sleep at your peril, it won’t change the nights.

Given that you say waking for hours, is it possible that your idea of bed time doesn’t match her biorhythm? Is it possible that what you think of as bed time is actually something her body treats as another nap? Some kids can go to bed at 6-7 pm for the night. Other kids go to bed at 9-10-11 pm/midnight, but catch an hour or so nap around 6 pm. Both of these sleep profiles are equally healthy and normal, but there is no money in it if the latter profile weren’t pathologized (if you get my drift). If you suspect your daughter is the latter type of child, then treat that evening nap as a nap and do the bed time routine later at true night sleeping time, and that will likely sort you right as rain. (Not for nothing but there is a correlation between what is socially considered a late bed time and intelligence.)

The early elementary boys I’ve cared for have had learn-to-read Spiderman books. I tried to hunt down the ones they’ve had and couldn’t find the exact titles, but I did find an example.

https://amzn.to/3PkIgOR

(theirs didn’t have the sound bar)

There’s a junior DC heroes television show which includes a little bit of heroistic violence yet whose dialogue focuses mostly on social and emotional themes. It is aimed for the preschool set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spidey_and_His_Amazing_Friends

ABSOLUTELY. What is the worry? That the kid is scamming you to get more food which they are then going to turn around and sell to their friends on the playground? Kids, especially infants, haven’t learned to have a dysfunctional relationship with food and hunger. If they are hungry, they show it. If they aren’t, they show satiety. Definitely don’t mess with this and you’ll get a human with a good food relationship.

You’ve got cause and effect wrong on the more food = food coma thing. Both are caused by the same thing but hunger can interfere. The same thing is a growth spurt. When a kid is in a growth spurt they eat a ton and sleep a ton. Now, hunger can prevent sleep even in a growth spurt. But that growth spurt is going to spurt and it is a great thing you are doing to support it.

Your parenting instincts ROCK.

“Leaf Mold” is the name given to that absolutely rich, fluffy, amazing turf found in forests. Could they have named it better so we don’t think of food gone rotten on the counter? Maybe. But it is a lovely, wonderful, amazing thing.

Best thing to do with leaves is leave them alone. Let them turn to fabulously delicious soil where they fall. And bonus, fewer chores to do. Plus you can sell all those leaf rakes and get some storage space back.

He could not touch the campfire at our camping trip.

I let him cry and gave him a snuggle and reaffirmed that I love him. Disappointment is real. End of the day is exhausting. It was time for bed and just one more disappointment than his tired brain could handle in a day. He slept very well.

Sign language “more” is such a regular occurrence in our house.

Beep. As in “beep, beep” after pressing the horn on Daddy’s car in the parking lot.

It might have been “mom” but it was part of an overall “mum-mum-mum” babble. And it could have been “dada” except Dad is really Baba/Ba in our household so dada has no meaning here.

Stop engaging the tantrum is what the literature says is the best practice. IIRC fMRIs show not that the mind (prefrontal cortex) is in a loop but that the prefrontal cortex is entirely shut down and the limbic system is highly active. Basically they are just having a tiny breakdown because whatever it is they are chanting about was the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of how much challenge they can accept in a day. Luckily, the other side of it is a reset and they are back to 100% capacity. So just let it be and when the screams change from anger to sadness, hug it out and then move along as if it never happened.

It is we adults who are bothered by tantrums. Kids don’t even remember them. Because the memory parts of the brain are offline. We have a choice about whether we are bothered. We can choose not to be.

For what it is worth, I’m middle aged and in my youth we played Mario Brothers and, later, Super Mario Brothers on televisions. But then we went outside and played a neighborhood game we made up called Koopa, loosely based around the Mario Brother’s lore. We spent far more time outside and interacting with one another than inside in front of a screen. I don’t think our outdoor play was worse for it being based on a screen-delivered universe than if we’d made up a game based on a book-delivered universe.

I don’t think screens, themselves, are the problem. I think forcing children to be solo-, inside-cats is the problem. And screens are often times a tool of that force. By the time children are of a certain age, they start to prefer what they know, which is why parents will say that their children don’t want to go outside and play with whomever. For whatever reason, parents around me are entirely too obsessively worried about dangers to allow their children to have chance encounters and a good, directionless wander. When kids play only with playdates they have to be driven to but don’t know their neighboring children, we have a problem. A big problem. Because it means spontaneous door-knocking “Can Johnny come out and play” play cannot occur. So of course they’ll pick a screen over acknowledging their loneliness.

There are a few shows that are a yes for me:

• Bluey

• Daniel Tiger

etc

And we can always watch the movies that our children’s department at our local library does showings of. Last one we went to was Migration. Which is an Illumination film. But the librarians approved it and did a whole program surrounding it, and it was really funny for the adults in the audience, though that humor went right over the heads of the children.

As for social media – Raising him on using Line to connect with his far away grandmother and so far he views phones as … well … phones. Not game machines. Not weird asynchronous conversations via text and reposts. Just the ability to get a live person on the other end for voice chats and/or video. We’ll see how long we can ride this wave. But I’m pretty sure I’m going to insist on parental controls if ever there are social media accounts made. I read somewhere that families where the parents use parental controls have more open and educational dialogue about online dangers and comportment than families where that is not in place. And I want that dialogue!

He has started bouncing on the trampoline. On the way to jumping!

[Kid’s name], stop exercising and get down here and eat some cake!

Which they’ve now decided they don’t like any of the food we make even though it’s exactly the same stuff that would be at daycare.

Are you judging this based on dinner? Ask any pediatric dietician and they will tell you that toddlers and preschoolers are quite likely to skip dinner. It might not be the food but the fact that there is a meal at that hour which is the issue. The recommendation is to serve a full meal afternoon snack and then consider dinner a bonus meal if they even eat it at all.

Which then prolongs the cycle of not eating enough and needing night feeds and then not eating much because there was milk overnight. I feel like we have to cut the night feeds somehow but it feels really cruel to starve them when they’re used to it…

Trust your instincts. It is biologically normal for children to have one or two night feeds up until age 3. Though at some point you can start leaving “the offering” (a bowl of food you are comfortable cleaning up left in their room for them to eat from overnight without waking you, such as a bowl of cheerios).

The sleep is a little better but still not sleeping through the night

Unless you get extremely lucky, plan on your child not sleeping through the night until age 3. Instead, focus on teaching them what is appropriate for them to do by themselves when they wake in their room. You’ll sleep through the night and they will wake, play with some toys, and put themselves back to sleep and everyone will thrive and be happy.

As a long term nanny and now a parent myself, I’ve had exactly ONE charge out of 22 + my own child who can sleep 8 hours with no bottle. He stirs but puts himself back to sleep silently and if you aren’t watching a video monitor, you’d have no idea that he had stirred.

But if you ask The Mister about our own child, he’d swear our own kid sleeps twelve hours with no bottle and no stirring. That’s because THE MISTER sleeps twelve hours and wouldn’t hear a smoke alarm, much less the child stir. So I agree with you to consider the source and that it is very likely fantasy talk.

• most babies do their highest caloric intake at night because it is the lowest stimulation time. While it is possible to have them fast all night long, it isn’t in their best interests because their stomach has a fixed size and simply cannot hold enough calories to get them through the nightly brain growth without a meal. Can vs should. And also, that pediatrician needs to attend some continuing education.

• the fact that children sleep less well in the room with the parents is EXACTLY WHY roomsharing is recommended to prevent SIDS. Cannot die in deep sleep if you never get to deep sleep. Sleep apart at your own risk. And on that note, almost every single SIDS prevention tip is designed to give your child sh-tty sleep in order to prevent sleeping deeply because you cannot die in deep sleep if you never get to deep sleep; it is by design. Ask me sometime how I feel about that.

• sleep training doesn’t teach them that their bed is safe to sleep in. It teaches children that parents don’t want to hear them cry. There have been objective studies that find that children night wake the exact same amount whether sleep trained or not. Absolutely no difference whatsoever. But the sleep trained children wake silently. So this one is one where the benefit is to the child from having a well rested adult caregiver. But the child doesn’t learn anything from it other than to shut up.

It for sure counts as “sorting”. He’s put the two in the same category. Well done for his age and right on target.

I read in another comment that you are trying to avoid a mass shooting episode. Instead of changing schools, let’s change access to ammo and mental health services via laws and voting, restricting one and making the other universal and taxpayer supported. I think that would be more effective. It would keep children safe in schools, in churches, in movie theaters, at birthday parties, etc.

I think that children learn best in the environment that fits their brain the best. If that’s remote - awesome - but if not, I’ll fight a different way for my child’s safety in a physically in person school setting. And my child needs the accountability of the in person setting.

I work in childcare. I take care of the children, both mine and those of other parents. Summer is very busy for me.

My 11 month old drank from a water fountain. We expected him to play in it, but he leaned in like a school child who had been doing it all their life and pursed his lips and took a slurp.