Our baby has slept in our bed since birth. First on my chest, then in the crook of my arm while nursing.
That stopped working because it was killing my back, and the baby was crying for boob 10-11 times a night. I was going slowly insane.
Around 5.5 months we hired two sleep consultants and tried to sleep train him. It failed spectacularly after some promising progress and I was not ok with letting my gorgeous smiling baby cry so much at night time. It did not feel right. If he wasn't ready to sleep by himself, and I loved having him with me, why should I try to force him?
We went to Australia and he was back on the boob all night. At the age of 7mo, we came back home and he was still nursing all night and my back was killing me. I decided something had to be done. I decided to stop nursing all night.
I was not interested in night weaning - I believe my son needs to eat at night, particularly as his weight gain really slowed the 3 weeks we tried to sleep train and he was being restricted to 2 night feeds. I can hardly even believe I did that. What was I even thinking? I restricted my child's feeding. I always said there were two things I'd never deny him - comfort and food. My boobs are both to him, and I denied him.
There was something I didn't get, that I get now. Just because we do things one way, doesn't mean we have to stop doing them if they don't work anymore. It means we just need to find a new way to do them, that works for both of us.
So I decided I would still feed him at night, as much as he wanted, but we would do it sitting up and when he was done I would put him down.
He cried for many, many nights. He was not impressed by the new arrangement. But I did not cave, and eventually he accepted the new normal.
Of course his sleep is still pretty shithouse. He wakes up anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours after being put down, and then every hour or two until morning. Sometimes around 3am and usually around 5 in the morning he struggles to go back to sleep; at 3 he might be awake rolling around behind me for an hours, and at 5am I have to put him on my chest to help him sleep until after 6am.
Going to bed is a production each night. We let him brush his own teeth, have started reading him a story, then I nurse him and then put him down on the bed. He rolls around. He blows raspberries on my arm. He curls into me then away from me. He touches my face. He scootches up to the top of the bed and scratches the wall. I pull him down, or roll him away, or towards me. He might cry. He grabs his feet.
Bedtime takes like 40 minutes. I often need dad to come in for reinforcement and sometimes, after long enough the baby cries and I need ot give him more milk, after which I will put him down and he will curl into daddy and go to sleep.
Other times I try to lay with him until he goes to sleep and he just won't stop playing, so I call daddy. Last night, daddy lay next to him quietly and he ended up turning himself upside down on the bed and falling asleep.
Maybe this is progress. I don't know. Sleep consultants and sleep experts would say that he has too many sleep crutches or sleep props and that's why he isn't sleeping through the night. I think he doesn't nurse enough during the day and that if he stopped eating at night, he'd not put on as much weight as he should. But I also think, once he starts crawling it's not safe for him to sleep in our bed and we will need to put him in his crib.
All I know is that I know nothing. My kid is cute though.
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