Fellow Parents: I'd like some advice for ditching the bedtime bottle habit?

I’d like advice from fellow parents only, please.

I’ve never been one to let my daughter Alyssa (now 13 months) ‘cry it out’, and that has always worked for us. The closest we got to letting her ‘cry it out’ is when we were teaching her to fall asleep in her crib without us there, and what we did was check on her after 5 minutes, then again after another 10 minutes, etc, until she had fallen asleep. After about 3 days, she would cry for a few seconds after we closed the door, then sleep peacefully the rest of the night.

The problem now is that Alyssa will not go to sleep (for naps or bedtime) without her bottle first. She will not take a pacifier. Because her crib was recalled, she currently sleeps on a twin-sized mattress on the floor in her room, so every night one of us lays on her mattress with her, feeds her a bottle (the sucking is comforting and she falls asleep by the end of the bottle), then leaves the room (she still cries from the time we stand up until we close the door, but then she goes to sleep).

I’m worried about her bottle habit and I’m ready to cut it out completely, but I’m not sure how – especially because she has problems with naptime. Even though when she was an infant I always put her down for naps with the lights on, she will not go to sleep unless it is completely dark and completely quiet – and I’m not saying she will take long to go to sleep, I’m saying she literally won’t go to sleep. For the last 3 days she hadn’t taken a daytime nap at all, and was just cranky all afternoon until bedtime… today we finally got her to take a nap by laying in the bedroom closet with her, where it was completely dark.

Any suggestions?