Hellobee Boards

Juts start offering it. We started by giving DD a straw cup with a bit of cold WCM at meals. At first she was confused, but she gradually got used to it and started drinking more. She's 18 mo now and still only gets WCM with meals. She drinks about 6 oz a day, which isn't much, but it's absolutely fine, nutrition-wise.

@Foodnerd81: I don't think that will be a problem at this age (as long as your LO is used to food) or at the beginning - it will likely take a while to build interest and then you can start offering WCM apart from meals if you are away.

@Foodnerd81: we offer both. But my DD drinks a TON of water throughout the day, so sometimes I just offer milk with meals.

@Foodnerd81: no it's the opposite. All the papers from my pediatrician's office emphasized this - don't offer WCM by itself. You offer WCM WITH meals so it's part of their normal food intake. They eat food and drink milk. If you offer milk alone they are likely going to drink the entire thing and get all their calories from WCM and will eat less at meal time.

We just offered her a cup of WCM with her meals 3 times a day. She hated it so we started off 90% milk and mostly water and slowly increased over a few weeks. Now she loves milk. We didn't purposefully wean but we started doing meals meals first and then nursing. She pretty much self weaned by 14 months.

I would start offering it in addition to nursing, not in replacement, unless you want to try dropping sessions (and even then, I tried to do that but LO hated WCM and wouldn't take it, so we just dropped sessions and didn't replace them with anything).

Honestly, I stressed so much about the transition and I really didn't need to. Next time I will just offer it with meals, and not worry about trying to replace nursing sessions with it, since that didn't work for me, and then I feel like they end up drinking a lot more milk, which you don't necessarily want.