Self-Feeding a Bottle At Nine Months

Just interested in other people's experiences on this.

My nine-month-old DD will often self-feed her first bottle of the day while she's in bed with me. That can vary between 5am and 7am so I'm usually VERY pleased that she can do this on her own with me just lying next to her.

But she's not interested in self-feeding her other bottles. This is not a big deal really but often it takes ages for her to finish a bottle when I give it to her. She's a very active baby and likes to have her hands free to bash the bottle or she'll get easily distracted and just keep getting on and off. It often takes up to 40 mins for her to finish. Obviously I don't keep trying if she's not hungry but most of the time she is.

So ... are other mums encouraging their babies to self-feed at this age and apart from cutting out all distractions, what else would you recommend?

I'm pretty sure that by 9 months DD was on 3 meals a day and i used to make up her daily milk quota in 4oz bottles (rather than the 7 or 8 you would divide into the "recommended" number of bottles) and let her self-feed all of them. If she didn't drink it all it was no biggie, and if she left it lying around more than an hour or so i just dumped it and gave her a fresh one next time. I found around 9mos she deifinitely began to switch her attention to food rather than milk, and though she still took some FF it was WAY less than some at that age. I think she preferred food she could "do" rather than "boring old milk". The first (7am) and last (6pm) bottles she always took great, the ones in between it was hit and miss.

Bx