i am desperate for sleep. please advise!

[lizajane]

i just don't know what is the best course of action, if there is one at all, and i am afraid to "try" too many things and end up in an inconsistant mess. but i am desperate so i need to try something!!! my sweet baby dylan has been waking me up over and over and over again every night for months. he slept all night at 9 weeks but at some point, he started waking up throughout the night for no apparent reason. i tried feeding him at every waking in case he was having a growth spurt. i tried feeding him at around the 2am wake-up in case he was reasonably hungry, but not starving to the point that hunger woke him so often. i tried just consoling him and not feeding him in case he wasn't hungry but was working himself into a snack habit. i tried just replacing his binker and leaving him in his bed. i tried waiting a few minutes to see if he would go back to sleep on his own. (can't let him cry, he shares a room with is brother.) i tried putting him right next to our bed so i could give him the binker as soon as i heard him stir. i tried just patting him when he was right by our bed. and finally- the latest is i just bring him into bed with us at his first wake up because i am so tired and so desperate that i can't bear to be awake for the amount of time it takes to get him out of his crib or the pack n play, even when in our room.

he seems to like being in our bed the best. and i love his snuggly warm baby body. but i am a thrash about insomniac sleeper and i need to be able to turn and roll and scramble covers. so co-sleeping is not a long term solution. and i worry that if i start now, it will be VERY hard to get him out of our bed. (i don't want him there for months... a few weeks might be ok.)

help!!

[Wife_and_mommy]

This is what happened to us......

DD slept through the night(w/ a couple late dream feeds) at 5 weeks. It was heavenly. Around 6 months she started waking up EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. I always got up with her and nursed her. We tried CIO towards the end of her first year but she cried for longer than was normal for her so I stopped. After her birthday, I started giving her yogurt or PediaSure before bed instead of nursing and she, just like that, was sleeping all night again.

In hindsight, I know she was hungry but at the time, I was just trying to get her back to sleep. I will be more proactive about daytime nursing with #2 as DD was too busy to eat alot of times.

You don't say if you're nursing but I'm resigning myself to more night wakings with #2 than we had with DD. I really believe she was not eating enough during the day to hold her all night once she became so aware and wanted to explore.

I would try squeezing more nursing sessions in during the day to see if your DS can hold off all night again.

I remember those zombie days well and hope yours will be over very soon! :)



Elizabeth

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Our second morsel due early February 2006!

[american_mama]

Liza: Just wanted to offer sympathies and hopes for improvement. I learned something reading your post and first reply, and if my DD starts doing the same, I will have more information on my side. So, your post helped me, and I hope someone else posts with a hot idea for you.

[crayonblue]

Liza,

I don't have any great words of wisdom, just empathy as we went through sleepless nights with Lauren. She did not sleep through the night except for once until she was 14 months.

I have no earthly idea what I will do (aside from go crazy!) if we have another baby who doesn't sleep!

The one thing that did help was that I woke Lauren to feed her before I went to bed and then put her back down. But, that was when we started CIO for the other 10 times she was waking.

Hope things get better soon!

[lizajane]

i am nursing and will for at least 6 more months. which means that DH has an excuse to "let" me do all the nighttime parenting. UGH. i do feed him pretty often during the day, at least compared to my first child. he is smaller than my first son and eats more often- who knows what quantity. i never have any reason to give him a bottle so i am clueless as to how many ounces he gets/feeding. he nurses around 5am, 7am, 10:30am, 1:00pm, 3:45pm, 6:30pm and maybe a little more before bed- which is between 7 and 7:45pm. and lately, around 1:30am also.

our ped (who is a breastfeeding supporter and a GI specialist, so i trust her advise about feeding since i know she thinks breastfeeding is important and she knows that you can screw up a baby's gut...) told me that he is big and hungry and to start up 2 solids meals. she told me to keep shoveling it in until he turns away. and i tried that. but it is really hard to get him to eat solids. he slurps them off a spoon, but doesn't really open up. so i am a little confused as to his readiness. we held off for a few days to see what happened, and i just "started over" by offering very small portions twice/day of very liquid-y homemade pears. we'll see...

sigh.

thanks for the quick replies everyone!

[Wife_and_mommy]

See, dd's ped wasn't a huge bf supporter once she was past about 6 months. He wanted us to start solids at 6m right away to get more calories into her kind of like your doc said. I've learned here from Tarah and others that our milk has more calories than baby food/cereal so with the next one I'll be working with the nursing more than letting DH stuff solids in her which went as well as it did for you.

Could you try cluster feeding towards the end of the day more? I know it'd be hard with a family to care for, but if it'd help DS fill his belly I'd enlist DH to help with the evening duties.

Our nursing "schedule" was pretty much like yours except it started at 7am and I couldn't wake her after I put her down because she'd think it was play time. I know now I stretched her too long due to the doc's advice so I won't be doing more than 2.5 hours for the first 6-8 months.


Hope all my rambling helps and that other more experienced moms chime in. You deserve a very long nap and I hope you get it! :)



Elizabeth

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[mudder17]

Liza, will he take a bottle or sippy of milk? When Kaya started waking (after sleeping well for a long time) more than 2x's a night, DH went to her at least one of the times with a full sippy of BM and she often would guzzle it down and then sleep for longer. It helped me because I wasn't trying to keep up with her so long. I just pumped a little extra during the day or went through my stash. Either way, after DH did that for a week or so, things settled down and she started sleeping a little longer so that she was nursing only once a night. Of course, this was at 8 months and she did eventually wake up 2x's again, but we just pulled out the 'ole sippy again. On the nights DH went in with the sippy, she would not wake as often. The other thing we did was that after I nursed her before bedtime, he would offer her more with the sippy. It turned out I was having supply issues (partly because I was sick but probably also because I was so sleep deprived), so I did rent a hospital pump to increase my supply, which eventually helped.


Eileen

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[psophia17]

The only thing that pops to mind that might help is having shorter feeding sessions during the day - it seems counter-intuitive, but when DS was starting to dawdle with feeds during the day, at about 4 mos, I would give him 10 minutes. The AM feed and the bedtime feed were always much, much longer, but during the day I wasn't going to struggle to get him to keep going because we both ended up frustrated.

It took about two weeks, but it seemed like all of a sudden DS got the point and quit wasting time during the day. He went from BFing every 2.5 or so hours to every 4 hours in no time, and then dropped the nighttime feed, so he'd go from a dream feed I gave him around 10:30 until 6am. It was wonderful.

Maybe something similar would work for you?