Sleep - toddler and baby and the juggling act!

Sleep is a reoccurring topic here at Baby Steps. I´m sure there are a lot of readers who feel like we do - sleep is vital! Not just for the children but for us as parents too.

 

Now that our 2 year old is settled into nursery, we are seeing a better sleep pattern from him. We have had a few full nights and others with just one brief night  waking. We have, however, had to limit his nap to just one hour. We found that when he slept longer in the day he was taking a long time to fall asleep and waking more frequently at night. I guess somewhere during this year he may drop this nap completely (ahhh then what will I do)?

 

Our (almost) 6 month old has learnt that we go out of sight and he doesn´t like it one bit! At 3 months he was sleeping very well even full nights or just one night waking around 4am for a feed. At the 4 month sleep regression (where babies learn to fall asleep by themselves) we noticed he was beginning to wake more frequently and looking to feed each time. For the first two days I fed him, assuming he must be going through a growth spurt, but he began to wake even more often. I went on a sleep research frenzy and came across the no-cry sleep solution by Elizabeth Pantley. The book is designed to very gently and gradually help your baby to sleep all night. As he had been a good sleeper and I knew he was waking for comfort not hunger, I searched the book and found a very important tip that I had never heard before. Never let the baby suck to sleep - whether bottle, dummy or breast feeding. Ok, so how do you stop this once its a habit? By letting baby suck until they are nearly asleep then gently removing. If he cries replace and repeat. This takes patience and some nights I would remove 7-10 times before he fell asleep but gradually he was able to fall asleep by himself and stay that way for a while.

 

After another month he started to wake more frequently again. Now he wasn´t having a dummy and I wasn´t feeding him to sleep so what to do here? I returned to a method we used with our older son which I discovered from Tracy Hogg the baby whisperer. The pick up, put down method. Her you pick up the baby then place him back down (all the way down even if he´s crying) then repeat until he is calm and drifts off to sleep alone.

This last week he has been waking more again but now I just need to rub or pat his tummy and he goes back to sleep. Every night waking I do this until he sleeps. If he takes a long time to go to sleep or wakes again within 30 minutes, I give him a feed and make sure I finish the feed before he is asleep.

 

Here´s hoping they both sleep a full night (the same full night please) very soon. It may seem like a lot of work but it´s worth it when you are feeling sleep deprived. I´ve found it very hard especially when my husband has been travelling and I have to deal with ALL the wakings alone (sometimes both of them at the same time)!

 

I recommend both of the books I have used as they both have really good ways to help you teach your baby to sleep. Both use no-cry methods which I prefer. I would say though, each family is different, each baby too, only do what you can cope with and if it´s working for you and your family - then it´s just fine. Nobody else has to go through it every night and nobody else knows your baby like you do.

 

Good luck and good sleeps for all parents and babies :)

Sleep at 9 months

We are here.... we have had our first (and since then several more) full nights sleep. 

We managed to wean him off his 3.30 bottle with ease and a colleague suggested I used the next size up in nappies and most nights this has done the trick (either that or his bladder has grown)!

The clocks went forward here a few weeks ago and we decided to try and keep him on his old routine so he would be going to bed an hour later and hopefully get up an hour later too! It worked for a few days and we managed to keep all feeding times an hour later so he is on a slightly better food routine but it was clear he was getting so tired by the evening we decided to put him to bed just 15 minutes earlier and this worked amazingly. He now goes to bed around 7.30/7.45 and gets up around 6. He still has some milk when he wakes up but we have started weaning him off it and so he has around 50mls in a sippy cup. He’s doing really well on his new routine and we are getting a good night’s sleep. Even the nights he doesn’t go all night we only have to change him or lay him down and he goes back to sleep straight away so we don’t feel like we have  very disturbed nights.

Naps have gotten even more flexible but he is so well rested from his night sleep and getting much more active during the day that it is hard to get a good nap routine going. As he seems quite adaptable during the day we haven’t worried too much about this. If he seems tired we put him in his room for a nap. He is napping very little in the morning now and having a longer kip in the afternoon so I assume he is preparing to drop the morning sleep and go for just one nap a day but I will wait and see what happens. If we go out in the car in the morning he normally has a cat nap and this is usually enough to get him through until he has had his lunch. If we’re at home he can nap at any time so we just watch for the signs and pop him in bed when he shows us he’s tired.

This routine has worked really well for us and we hope it continues throughout the holidays (where he will be travelling to different time zones and climates) and into the New Year.