Attachment Parenting

Frequent night wakings- help! Need an AP-friendly solution

My almost-ten-month old is a terrible sleeper and it's starting to become a problem. He's never been a great sleeper (in the STTN sense), but it's gotten worse since the time change a couple weeks ago. Lately he's been waking up every 1-2 hours throughout the night. We nurse to sleep, and every time he wakes up he needs to nurse back to sleep. Once or twice out of 7-8 wakings he's actually eating, but mostly it's a two minute comfort suck before passing out again. We put him to bed in his crib and he sleeps there usually until his 2-3am wakeup, when I bring him into our bed. He sleeps marginally better in bed with us, but not much (as in, closer to the 2h end of things than the 1h). DH helps as much as he can, but if he picks up DS when he cries DS just gets even more worked up and thrashes about screaming "Maaaaaamaaaaa!" until he gets me. 

I have been dealing with this as best I can, but the lack of sleep has started to take a toll on me. I haven't had a stretch of sleep longer than 3-4 hours (very, very occasional- maybe once a month if I'm lucky) since September. I love nursing DS to sleep and don't want to do a straight CIO, but I need to do something about eliminating all of these night wakings. I have no idea where to start. We're a pretty AP family and I do remember reading somewhere to try having LO cry in daddy's arms instead of nursing back to sleep for his regular wakings, so he's sort of doing CIO, but not alone...has anybody tried this? Or can anyone give me any guidance on what to try? DH has a 4 day weekend for Easter so we thought it might be a good idea to try and solve his night wakings over this weekend. 

Sorry, this is probably really rambling. Help! 


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Re: Frequent night wakings- help! Need an AP-friendly solution

  • I don't know how AP this is, but night weaning has helped with decreasing the number of night wakings immeasurably.  Obviously, we are still BF.  We also bedshare.  DD is now 16 months, so I don't know how well this will work for yo

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  • Kimeetee, that does sound similar to what I had read in that they're crying, but not alone. 

    When you stopped nursing to sleep, did she just fall asleep on her own, or did you rock/shush/sing/etc? We usually nurse and rock and I actually enj


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  • We do not rock/sing. Sometimes we shush, but I don't think it helps.  Silence is the best for DD.  We just basically hang out in bed with her.  So she has this whole routine she does and it takes her a while to fall asleep.  Sh

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  • We did partial night weaning, though when DD was older, and that helped a bit.  Have you verified that he's not waking up due to peeing his diaper?  DD still does that. She would end up crying next to me when we did the partial night weaning,

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