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BFing moms - sleep regression - any ideas?
Sooo. Grady is waking every two to three hours at night now. Yippee. Call it the four month wakeful or whatever but it sucks. He wakes and nurses really well for like ten minutes so I know he's hungry and not just wanting to be comforted. Soooo. I guess I'm just looking for ideas to try and get him to sleep longer. He nurses for.ev.er. prior to initially falling asleep and his first stretch is from about 7:30ish to about 12:30 so I know he can sleep! Should I try nursing him on both sides during his night feedings (he usually nurses on only one side) so he's not up after our 12:30 feeding at 2:30, 4:30 and 6:30? I'm just really tired and a little frustrated because I *know* he can sleep longer because he used to do it!
Oh! I've also thought about doing a dream feed when Abe and I go to bed at 10ish. Do y'all think that would help? I know trying wouldn't hurt but didn't know if anyone had personal experience. I just need a longer stretch of sleep than what I'm getting now.
Oh! I've also thought about doing a dream feed when Abe and I go to bed at 10ish. Do y'all think that would help? I know trying wouldn't hurt but didn't know if anyone had personal experience. I just need a longer stretch of sleep than what I'm getting now.
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Re: BFing moms - sleep regression - any ideas?
Jac, we went through the same thing, just a tiny bit shy of four months. For a few days Anne was up almost every hour and a half, and I felt - like you - that she was truly hungry and needed to nurse.
I would try nursing him on both sides, and also see if you can put him down awake. I know it seems counter intuitive, but Anne did so much better when I nursed her at the beginning of the bed time routine instead of the end.
GL! Getting up that often is NO fun!
Ditto both of these suggestions!
I hope it gets better!
oh, I personally haven't tried it but I wouldn't want to try dream feeding. I am a big fan of don't wake the sleeping baby. I wouldn't want to risk interuppting his sleep anymore.
Also, we were supposed to wake Andrew as a newborn at night because he's was a preemie and if we did, he was too tired to eat well anyways so we didn't do that.
Oh yeah - I also tried a dream feed for a little while, and I was able to successfully do it without her really waking up. It allowed me to know that i could go to sleep and get 2-3 hours of sleep, as opposed to me falling asleep and potentially being woken 30 minutes later by a hungry baby. However, it didn't help her sleep longer stretches.
How long did it take y'all to have success with the drowsy-but-not-asleep thing? I've tried laying G down drowsy but he just won't fall asleep. He'll lay there happily for about ten minutes then wig out
At that age Andrew still needed help sometimes. As in, we put him down awake, and if he got upset, we went back, held him a minute, and set him back down. We never let him cry. It worked well - he developed the self-soothing skills he needed to put him back to sleep when he naturally stirred at night.
We LOVE dream feeding--and we still do it. She doesn't wake up too much, and she goes right back down. I'll nurse her around 8:30 before she goes down at 9, and we'll feed her a bottle of whole milk around 10:30 when we go down. I found it was even easier to dream feed when I still nursed her for that session.
If he does still wake up after 12:30, I'd nurse from both sides to make sure he's getting nice a full!
This sounds wonderful, especially the part about self-soothing. It won't be long till we have to move Grady to his crib because he is rapidly outgrowing his cosleeper. I hope the end of his night wakings coincide with the big move
True! Keep at it and it'll happen. You do not have to make them cry to give them chances practice self-soothing. We never had to do CIO and it was really awesome that none of us had to go through that. It's nice to avoid it if you can AND have a great sleeper :-)
I totally agree with you on the pure sweetness of this. It's like being a part of one of life's most perfect moments. That being said, I still nurse Anne before bed, just not right before, and now after we read bedtime stories and I walk her into her dark room, she snuggles up on me and puts her head down and we just share a few quiet snuggly moments before I put her in her crib. (She does this like the second we walk into her room; I think it's kind of neat to see that she knows it's bedtime)
Her sleeping periods changed for the better once she was in her own room and her own crib. The co-sleeper totally worked for us for a long while, and I will definitely use it againf or baby #2, but I think she was ready for the transition (it was around 4 months for us too).
As far as how we did it - I used other "sleep aids" - music in her room when she fell asleep, reading her the same books, the same routine, to try to encourage her to know that it was bedtime. I used to hold and rock her for four songs on her bedtime playlist. I gradually shortened the amount of time I did this. Now we don't play the music at all. If she cries, I go back in to comfort her, but more often than not, she either goes right to sleep or babbles for a little while and then falls asleep.
Good luck! Bottom line is that you have to do what works for you.
I'm not adding anything new here, but wanted to say a few things:
*Ella had the same sleep regression
*Dream feeding never worked for us
*Like Jocelyn, we found that Ella's sleep patterns changed dramatically when she moved into her own room at about 7m
Also, if you're not ready to let Grady self-soothe (whether that means crying or not), and if you're not ready to nurse him to sleep, don't give it up! Trust me when I say that babies grow and change much too fast to want to rush into something. I'd do almost anything to get the days back when I nursed Ella to sleep!
I totally agree with this. I'm not BFing and LO already sleeps in his own crib, but I am having the 4 month sleep regression - fun. He used to fall asleep right away and now it takes forever! And I have to be very careful to avoid eye contact or smiling at him at night - or he just wants to smile and play.
It's hard, but I know this, like so many other things the first year, is a phase and 'this too shall pass'. The best advice my BFF gave me with DD1 was "That thing that you are sooooo worried about this week (i.e. anything baby development or feeding or sleeping related) - it probably won't be your 'big issue' 2 weeks from now. Babies and their habits change so fast, just go with the flow and ride it out"
Dream feeding worked well for us. As someone mentioned above, I knew that I would get another 2-3 hours of uninterrupted sleep if I fed her before I went to bed. I think I dreamfed until around 5 months (successfully without waking her). The only reason I quite is because she wakes up very frequently anyway, and it's generally not to eat. The dreamfeed wasn't buying me any more time, so it seemed pointless.
I do think it's worth a try in your case since he's waking up clearly hungry.
A lot of the "sleep training" methods didn't work for us. It's definitely worth a try if you're ready for that, but I'm not sure how well it'll work if he's truely waking up hungry. You might want to make sure that this isn't something that's going to just resolve itself. I think the "4 month wakeful" generally resolves on it's own.
As always, thanks for the encouragement and tips
I really do miss nursing Claire to sleep. She's been really tired this past week due to teething, so I was able to nurse her to sleep twice--poor thing. I just held her for 15 minutes after she was asleep each time before I put her down. Enjoy it while you can.