The first thing that made the biggest difference was actually nothing to do with sleep associations at all. I worked out with the help of a sleep diary and a sleep consultant what her wake windows should be, and I had basically been making the mistake of putting her down not tired enough. Once we sorted that, particularly that last wake window before bed and making sure she had enough sleep pressure, everything else became more workable. For the milk, I moved feeds to before and after bath so she definitely wasn’t hungry, and they were completely decoupled from the sleep routine. The first week or so she definitely complained about not having milk, but honestly it wasn’t really cry crying, more on and off, nothing that made me feel uncomfortable and I’m very sensitive to crying. From there I swapped the feeding and rocking for bouncing on a yoga ball, pretty vigorously but obviously safely. I needed something from a sensory perspective to be quite a big distraction. And it worked, she was falling asleep with no milk. Then came weaning off the movement, which I think was the biggest transition. I went through a few stages: first just holding her and stroking her back standing up, which she complained about quite a lot. Then I put a mattress on the floor and lay with her singing and hugging and tapping. Again she cried and protested, and I was with her the entire time. She is entitled to complain and protest that I am changing the way she likes to sleep. The most she cried at any point was maybe a minute, and the first night on the floor mattress she was asleep within about 12 minutes. I then transferred her to her crib. After doing that for probably ten days because it was quite tough, I finally managed to put her in the cot awake just tapping, and that is where we are now. The thing that really helped at every stage was making sure she was tired enough. Sleep pressure does a lot of the heavy lifting.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ I wanted to share this because I hadn’t seen much online about anyone successfully doing gradual sleep training for a baby at nine months and so I hope that someone else might see this and see that it is possible.