The Dream Feed

The Dream Feed is my favourite of all tricks in getting a young baby to sleep through , this i would recommend introducing early in the first 3 months though around 6 weeks is the best time as this is when your baby is 100% capable of sleeping through the night without a feed no problems.
I would usually give a last awake sleep at 7pm , after babies bath wrapped warmly in a towel is when i would give the last awake bottle feed , the reason i did it before dressing was to make sure the baby did not fall asleep on the bottle as you really need to put your baby down in their cot/crib awake. They mush be able to get them selves back to sleep at night without this capability there is no way your baby is going to sleep through (we will come back to this later for all those babies that cant yet do this).
Any way the dream feed , before you go to bed and before your baby is due to wake for a feed , i always found 11 to be a good time. Gently lift your baby out of their cot and gently lower their bottom lip by gently touching their chin and then moving the bottle side ways over their lips pop the bottle in . You made need to jiggle the bottle about for a min but then hey presto they should start feeding . At this moment baby is still fast asleep hence the term dream feed . No they can not choke or anything else its just the same as feeding them awake , just a bit slower :) If they stop feeding just try again and see if they want anymore, if not put baby back in crib. (some babies can be winded asleep) though i only recommend this if you have a very windy baby(change of teat maybe if you do) Continue to do this every night and gradually baby willl take less milk per night , when there down to taking only 1fl oz or you get the feeling that there not really taking anything from the night feed anymore , trust your instints and the next night leave it and you should find that baby does not wake up until morning , bliss, well it should be but for the first few nights its perfectly normal to keep waking up to make sure baby is ok , takes a while to get used to lol .(the dream sleep assumes your baby is in a routine and just wakes once a night which is average come 6 weeks of age )
Bare with me as i get the time i will move onto older babies who this wont really work for and those who are not yet in a routine or cant get themselves to sleep.
P.S the dream feed is bottle designed but there is no reason it cant work with breast feeding to . Give it a go and let me know!