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February 2012 Moms
sparks2987
member
Time to sleep train...help
sparks2987
member
I am late to the game on this one. Emily has never STTN, ever. I was a worried wreck about her weight and trying to get as many calories into that tiny body as possible. So I have always woken up with her every 2-3 hours to feed her, without a second thought. In my mind she NEEDED the extra calories.
She is still under weight but the doctor ensured me that although she is small and her weight is still underweight for her age only 14lbs, because she is gaining just slowly, I could sleep train her. She doesnt need to eat every 2-3 hours at night.
So tell me your sleep train secrets....I am desperate for some sleep.
She goes to sleep easily for bedtime after bath, bottle, book then to bed. It is the 3 to 5 times she is up at night I need help with. Also if I could get her to sleep past 5 am that would be amazing.
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Re: Time to sleep train...help
I had the same hang up as you. For the longest time I wouldn't do sleep training because I was convinced that at their size (they were in the 13% for weight at their 9 month appointment) they needed to wake up to eat. After all, if they were so small with waking up to eat at night what would happen if they didn't wake up? We did sleep training around 8 months to help with their initial going down, but at their 9 month appointment their doctor said the same as yours.
We tried to break the nighttime habit using water instead of formula (per his recommendation) but the girls were having none of it. Do you BF or FF? If you FF, what worked for us was offering a small amount of formula and watering it down. So they were normally taking one 6 ounce bottle and first we offered 4 ounces watered down, then after a couple of nights 2 ounces watered down. After the 5th or 6th night they both just didn't wake up for a bottle.
Do you have issues with sleep in general or just waking up to eat? If it's just waking up to eat, giving her less calories at each wake-up might solve your problem. If not, a lot of sleep training is personal preference. We tried the Ferber method first of going in at increasing intervals. Seeing us (especially me) made it SO much worse. We finally just used the extinction method - which I was 100% against - and it worked like a charm. There was a few minutes of all out screaming and I was sure it wasn't going to work, then they just went to sleep. Now if they wake up at an unacceptable time (like 4 or 5 am) or take a nap that isn't long enough (as in only 30 minutes) we let them cry and after 2-3 minutes they're back asleep.
Sorry this was so long!
This is exactly what we did and it worked for us. Our ped recommended it as well. We would give 2 oz formula/2 oz water for a night or two and then we went to 3 oz water, 1 oz formula. It worked like a charm. Now, when he wakes up looking for food, which is very, very unlikely, we will continue to give him a watered down bottle.
Good luck. I know it can be really difficult to break this habit, but you'll get there!
I did the water thing with my oldest - he was about a year old so he was on whole milk. So he got water in a sippy and he quit waking up after a few days. He knew sign language and it was a little funny to see him furiously signing milk to me - poor baby! But he got over it quickly.
I will do the same thing this week with my son who is breastfed (my oldest I pumped exclusively for because he never learned how to nurse) so I think it will be harder for him because he uses it as a chance to snuggle which I love but we cosleep so we basically snuggle all night. I'm going to put water in a sippy tonight and see how it goes.