Pierce out of the gate seemed to be a better sleeper than Will, but still seems to have a fast metabolism and wanted to eat every four hours at night. After talking with my good friend Ashlee whose baby starting sleeping through the night at 6wks I immediately began picking her brain. Miss Charlotte (baby #3) was born two days after Pierce and Ashlee assured me she had no idea how/why her girls slept through so early but the more she talked the more I realize that she actually did have a method. Ashlee had been telling me that when Charlotte would wake she would first put the paci in and try to hold her off. Miraculously, Charlotte would sleep several more hours. It made perfect sense to me as you truly do have to train their tummies that nighttime is NOT the time to eat. I also had joined a facebook group called "I love babywise" which is a support group for Mom's who subscribe to Parent Directed Feeding. They had a document with tips for sleeping through the night and the suggestions seemed to loosely coincide with my conversation with Ashlee. Here is an excerpt of their suggestions:
2) In the early morning (5-6ish), feed until your baby goes back to sleep and then put him down. The MON ; and early morning feeds are the times you don't have to worry about feeding baby to sleep. Now I'm not saying that if baby is fast asleep as soon as he latches on, you put him down...you know what I mean. With mine, I'd work a little harder at the first MON feed (anywhere from 1-3am usually), but at the early morning feed, I just go 5-10 min on one side. This way a) you are back in bed sooner and b) baby will take a full feeding at the first official feeding of the day.
3) Some time between 8-12 weeks, use controlled crying to push the MON feeding back. In my experience, my babies would go from two night wakings to one at about 8 weeks. It would just suddenly happen. From there, I'd begin to work on that last MON feeding. I'll try to describe the;process....If, for example, my baby had demonstrated that he could routinely make it from 10:30 (DreamFeed)- 3:00, I would set 3:00 as the minimum time. So if he woke at 2:00, I'd allow 15 minutes of crying. To my surprise, what often happened was that he'd cry 10 min and then fall back asleep until 3:30 or whatever. When he woke again, I'd get him. After a few nights, I'd reset the "minimum" time to 3:30. This would go on for about 2 weeks, at which point I'd have the MON feeding pushed back to 5- something. At that point, I dropped it. With my babies, it required two nights of off & on crying. It was not as bad as I feared, and they never looked back after that.
4) Limit the amount of milk offered at the MON feedings. This is the method utilized by the author of the BW blog (babywisemom.blogpsot.com). It is used in place of the CIO method outlined above. I've never tried it, but here's how it works...You offer progressively less milk at each MON feeding over the course of a few weeks. If you are breastfeeding, you'd start by limiting the time at the 2nd breast. Then work your way down to just doing one side. After that, limit time on the first side. This gets baby used to taking in less at night and more in the daytime.
I should say that I have yet to do the crying it out, not because I am oppose to it, but because I would fully wake up if I listened to him scream for 15 minutes. What I have done is hold him off at the 30 minute intervals with the paci (because there is no paci in the world that would put Pierce back to sleep for several hours). This past weekend was rough holding him off from 4 am to 5am but yay! It has worked. Pierce did his first night of sleeping til 5:30am (7 hours straight) without a peep. I am hopeful that by the end of the week he will be fully sleeping til 7:30am! Yay!!! I simply cannot even believe it. What I love about this advice is that it doesn't presume that baby will automatically know how to sttn but needs to learn. I wish so badly I had known this for Will! But that's the story of first time parents! Hope this is helpful for those in the trenches right now! I am definitely a Momma who needs 8 hours of sleep!
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