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Babies: 6 - 9 Months
mcanant
member
DcMerged
mcanant
member
Hw did it go last night? Your sleep situation is so much like ours and we tried the approach to take mom out of the equation for the first two makings of the night. Hubby is giving bottles of milk and after a few nights, she has y want an ounce or so each time then screams for mom. It's taken an hour or so each time to get her asleep again. How did your night go last night? Did your new method work? Any modifications?
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Re: DcMerged
After night #3 I am happy to report, it has been sooo much better than I expected it to be. Sorry if this is long, but wanted to give some background then I'll give you the play-by-play of sleep training.
We co-slept when he turned 4 months old until about 6 months. I went back to work, missed the cuddles and he reversed cycled a bit so I thought he needed to nurse a lot at night to make up the calories.
By 5 months, he was drinking from the bottle just fine, he was rolling around so much in the bed it was making me nervous, and he continued to want to comfort nurse every 2 to 3 hours at night. I was exhausted. I bought the No Cry Sleep Solution and tried the methods to break the comfort nursing. It helped with that but I still wasn't getting any better sleep.
At 6 months we transitioned him to the crib over several weeks and continued to nurse and/or rock him to sleep at every waking to get him used to sleeping in his own room (he had been taking naps in his crib for a month before that). I was able to get down to 2 MOTN nursings. We tried daddy giving him a bottle of expressed milk too but that didn't really seem to make a difference in his night wakings, and I didn't like the idea of him getting a bottle when I'm at home so we stopped that.
By 7 months, he still needed us to get him back to sleep at every waking and was waking at least 4 times a night. The rocking also stopped working well because I think he was becoming more aware that he knew we were going to eventually put him down so he was "on guard." He would cry even when we rocked him. I did finally get down to one MOTN nursing though. The reason I wanted to go to one is because the second one was too close to morning so he wouldn't want to nurse well before I left for work.
Have you read Ferber's book? I bought it and it is really good and talks about the importance of routines and how much nap and night sleep to expect. We got him on more of a consistent nap routine (3-3.5 hours) which helped because we realized that some days he was napping up to 5 hours! And the nap start times and morning wake up times were inconsistent so it was confusing him.
Then after getting all of the above sorted out, and he was still waking every 2 to 3 hours, we knew we needed to do some sleep training. Here's how it went.
Night #1. Usual bed time routine, which does include nursing him as the last step with the lights out in the rocking chair - My favorite part of the day and I wasn't giving this up! The difference is that instead of putting him to bed asleep and sneaking out, I made sure he was slightly awake when I put him down. He started to cry, I left the room, came back after one minute to reassure him. Came back after 3 minutes, came back after 5 minutes (this is when I started to cry!). However, after less than 20 minutes, he stopped crying and fell asleep. He woke at 12:30, I promptly went to him, nursed him and put him back down awake. He cried for one minute and fell asleep. He didn't wake again and we had to wake him at 7:00 a.m. Pretty good! We put my pillowcase in his crib as well as a "lovey" (a stuffed dog he likes) and both I think helped alot.
Night #2. The usual bedtime routine. He cried for about 5 minutes I think, played with his lovey and fell asleep! He woke at 11:30, I nursed him and he fell asleep in about a minute. He woke at 2:30 and here's where we made a mis-step I think. He was complaining but not really crying hard for 3 minutes at which point was the check in time. However, we should have waited longer as he wasn't really upset. My husband went in and it set him off. He was so upset and this went on for 50 minutes (our max time between checks was 7 minutes that night). We agreed that if it was getting close to an hour that we would do something so daddy picked him up, comforted him and then put him back and he fell asleep quickly after that. We felt really bad that we should have waited a bit before checking on him the first time as it made him so upset to see us and not have us pick him up. It also made us realize that we can pick him up and comfort him (reset him) and the training can still work. Lessons learned.
Night #3. The usual. He fussed for about a minute, played with his lovey for a little while (don't think he was as tired), and fell asleep. Woke at midnight, nursed and back to sleep in less than a minute. Woke at 7:00. Success!
Good question and I think not sufficiently. Growth spurts - not sure if you need to change anything as you can make sure they get more milk during the day. But for sickness and teething, we plan to comfort him at night and make sure he's not in pain. It can throw the night sleep off track but I'm fine with that.