Thursday, March 6, 2014

SLEEPLESS IN SAN DIEGO

When Henry came home, he was sleeping five, even six hours at night, and continued to do so until he was about three or four months old. A growth spurt caused a shift in sleep needs, he started waking up every few hours. While I was able to get us back on a consistent daytime schedule, he kept waking up at night to eat or to let us know he had wiggled an arm out of his swaddle.

We stopped swaddling so he could get used to sleeping unbound. I cut out the middle-of-the-night feeding. He's fine without it and can go until morning to eat. But he keeps waking up, consistently between three and four in the morning, and the broken sleep is starting to wear me down. It's especially hard since I had been getting full nights' sleep, then had to stop.

How can I get him to sleep through the night? I've read some books (Happiest Baby on the Block and Baby Wise 2) but am more interested in some of your successful methods.

1 comment:

  1. What do you do when he wakes up? Do you hold him? Rock him? How do you settle him back down? The thing I worried about most was not feeding them in the night once we had dropped that feeding. That's what will keep them waking up. It seems like they'll eventually stop waking up if they aren't getting rewarded. They might keep waking up for snuggles, especially once they learn a little separation anxiety. I still have to settle down my 1-year-old occasionally because crying it out only makes him get too worked up to sleep. So I go in, put his pacifier in his mouth and pat his back a time or two and leave. I try to not pick him up if I can help it. I hope that helps! It's so hard to be waking up in the night. You kinda get used to it when they're newborns, but once you go back to sleeping it's really hard to give that up again :)

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