We Waited-It-Out Successfully!

[too_scared]

Oh Jessy, that sucks. I hope B starts sttn more often soon.

 

[Vicki_Cream]

I'm glad that Finn has settled now TS

I hope B starts to sleep better soon, too!

Last night was marginally better, but Molly has caught OH's poxy cold, so she keeps waking herself up coughing. I took her to the park this morning as she was really hyper and she kept asking for her shoes and pointing to the front door haha. It was such a glorious morning, even though it was bloody freezing! We were wrapped up warm, and she had a blast toddling about in her wellies and rustling through the leaves lol. The fresh air and exercise seemed to have had the desired effect, and she went down for her nap without a fight for the first time in weeks. I'm going to make an effort and get her out every day from now on, it'll be easier once the weather improves!

I'm expecting another restless night, but OH has got a day off tomorrow so has promised he will take her out for the day so I can catch up on sleep and have some me time.

 

[Vicki_Cream]

Well, what a difference a few days can make!

Since Thursday, Molly has been self settling IN HER COT for every nap and bed time. I'm still having to sit in the room with her and occasionally shush and rub her back, but she drifts off without even a little bit of a whinge! The first night it took 1 hour 45 mins, second night it took 1 hour 15 mins and last night it took 40 minutes, it's literaly as if a switch has been flicked in her brain and she's like "oh!I can do this myself!"

The only things that I can think of that I've been doing things a bit differently are I've been giving her a proper baby massage every night after her bath (looked it up on youtube lol), and she's been having my incredibly flat pillow in her cot as she has always liked to snuggle it as I guess she can smell me on it. I've also been saying to her "Its time for bed" and then lay her down after feeding her. If she sits/stands up, I lay her back down and repeat the phrase. She definitely know what it means now, and after a couple of times of laying her back down and saying this, I only have to say it and she'll lay herself down.

I'm soooo flippin' excited, I'm so sad haha! She had two four hour stretches last night, then was restless from 4 am - 7.30 am, so she did sleep a lot better than she has done. She even woke up a few times and I saw her shuffle about for about 30 seconds, then she laid back down and went to sleep.

Weeeeeeeee!

 

[too_scared]

Yay! That is fantastic!

 

[JessyG]

That's awesome chick!

We have been having a better week only one bad night on Friday and I think her teeth were bugging her. All other nights its either been sttn or one quick resettle. Tonight I have been up for 2 hours so not great either but she is back in bed so I am off to the land of nod myself.
Hope everyone is well.

 

[gingmg]

Thank you for this thread. My almost 4month old is such a bad sleeper. We co-sleep as a result because it works. Im sick of hearing I need to let him cry it out. I don't want to do that to him. I'm recently back to work on the night shift (3 nights a week) and my OH (wife) has been having really tough nights when I'm gone. I'm hoping she starts co-sleeping too because otherwise I'm afraid her patience will start running thin and she will join the others with 'just let him cry'. Its nice to know other people feel the we way I do about this.

 

[Larkspur]

Just dredging up this thread to check in on everyone, and report in.

After a fairly horrific stretch of near-hourly wake ups, DD's sleep has settled down to about three 3-4 hour stretches. I'm still co-sleeping after the first wake up, but soon I'll start pushing it back to the second, and then the last one.

She's walking now, and I think she will drop down to one nap in a couple of months, so I'm holding out hope for STTN starting to happen by 14 or 15 months.

How's everyone else?

 

[AK89]

I've not properly read through this thread yet but I think I'm going to.. I've just kinda come to the realisation that this is the kind of thing I wanna do with my DD. Not that I've used any other sort of sleep training so far.. I've been lucky that she's (pretty much!) always been a good sleeper until recently. In the past month or so she's been much harder to get to sleep in the first place; it used to be that we'd give her a bath at 6pm, I'd give her a long feed and she'd fall asleep in my arms then I'd put her down still asleep. Sometimes she'd stir and fuss so I'd pick her up and get her back to sleep/rock her crib and she'd settle. Luckily, despite this need to be rocked/fed to sleep, she's always been good at self-soothing throughout the night if she stirs. Throughout the first few months though I felt like it was looming over me that sooner or later we'd have to "teach her to self-soothe", (as in be able to put her down awake) which filled me with dread! Recently I've come across a blog by a woman called Sarah Ockwell-Smith and have bought her book 'cause I really like her way of looking at things. In short, she says it's OK that babies need to be comforted to sleep because they're not actually capable of self-soothing at such a young age. Even if they're physically fine, they might need us for emotional reasons. And any form of letting your baby cry can be detrimental to them. She also mentions that it's not possible to spoil your baby this way as they're not manipulative beings! So it seems like it goes in line with the WIO method, which I actually hadn't heard of before..

Here's a link to the blog if anyone's interested. It really made me feel better about the whole thing! https://sarahockwell-smith.com/tag/pick-up-put-down/

So as I said, my 6 month old has recently become VERY hard to put down... She just seems to have 1,000,000 other things she'd rather be doing than sleeping, even when she's EXHAUSTED! It seems she's just not that into feeding herself into a daze these days! So she's taking ages to get to sleep and getting overtired in the meantime At the moment it's taking roughly 2 hours after bathtime to get her to sleep. We have white noise, a musical projector, a dim room, books, a dummy, a bath followed by a massage... I have a few other tricks up my sleeve that I've read in the book by the author I mentioned (The Gentle Sleep Book) but not sure they're gonna make much of a difference. But I'm happy to spend that time with her if that's what she needs! I know she's not gonna be this age forever and I'll look back on it in the future and wish I could go back in time. So I'm gonna try not to stress about it too much and be constantly trying to "solve the problem", I'm just gonna embrace it and "wait it out"!

Night-times have been tougher as well. She's been waking every 2 hours for a feed and has been up from 5.30-6am We've recently started co-sleeping though so it's not too much hard work since we breastfeed.

It's nice to see lots of other people take this route! Will definitely be having a read through the whole thread to look out for tips!

 

[too_scared]

Welcome ak89. There's a huge mental leap at 6 months. Just hang in there and I'm sure she'll be back to her sleeping self again soon.

Finn has had a bit of a sleep regression (mental progression!) lately. He's also getting his 2 year molars and they are being very hard on him, poor guy.

I'm nearly 30 weeks pregnant now and bf'ing is VERY sore. Last night Finn was awake for 2 hours bf'ing, crying, and just generally unhappy. He only just started sleeping a nice 8 hour stretch at the beginning of the night about 3 months ago so this is a bit upsetting. Sometimes he sleeps well and sometimes he wakes every 2 hours or more and only stays in bed for 8 hours. We're working on naps but haven't really figured them out yet. Sometimes if he naps he won't go to sleep until 11 and sometimes he absolutely needs a nap.

Lately he's been wanting to comfort nurse all night long. It causes me so much pain. I'm not getting any sleep. He's just started learning to speak in sentences. And I think this is causing the sleepless nights and comfort nursing. I'm really hoping he starts sleeping again before his sister comes.

I hope you're all well.

 

[felix555]

We are still awaiting the elusive STTN over here

 

[Larkspur]

Hey AK89, welcome! There's a big growth spurt at six months, and that can ruin sleep for a while. The good news is it gets better. The bad news is it gets worse! And then the good news is it gets better again. (Etc. one of the most frustrating things about sleep is that it's not linear.)

I think that a lot of stuff you read about sleep is a crock, in fact, probably the whole baby sleep industry is a crock. Some babies sleep well, some don't, and like Forrest Gump says, you never know what you're gonna get. Sometimes CIO / CC works, other times it doesn't. Even if it does work short-term, there's no guarantee it will work long term. One of my friends who did full-extinction CIO now has a toddler who is a worse sleeper than my son who never STTN till 16 months.

All the stuff about routines and putting down drowsy but awake etc, I am pretty sure that's a crock too. You'll see a lot of posts saying "I was really strict about bedtime routines and my baby STTN from 6 weeks." These people, bless them, have nothing to teach you. They just got lucky with good-sleeping babies, that's all. I've had solid bedtime routines since day 1 practically; didn't make any difference. My daughter has self-settled since birth, but doesn't STTN. My son started STTN before he was self-settling.

WIO is the only rational response if you ask me! But it's not just about gritting your teeth. For me, it's been about learning how to organise my life and soothe myself when I'm getting frustrated (eg not having low-blood sugar before putting down the baby, making sure OH has my back, breathing techniques or mantras for when I'm getting agitated, etc).

And the good thing is that those organizational skills, strategic thinking, self-care and self-soothing techniques last well beyond the baby years!

 

[JessyG]

Hey! Everytime I discuss Belle's sleep getting better we end up having an awful night, coincidence!!

Since 2 new teeth came through on Christmas day her sleep has been much better. We have one or two bad nights a week but she is getting her canine teeth through now so I assume its that plus sometimes she just wants to have a blether! (is that a completely Scottish word!) the bad nights are still bad but the good nights are ace!

 

[Literati_Love]

Hello there.

I think I need to join. I know it is probably because the other babies here are older and have already made progress, but I feel like everyone's LOs are doing so well compared to mine. Oy. Like everyone else, I would like to avoid sleep training!

Basically... My dd is 8 months old. We co-sleep because since 3.5 months old she has refused to be put down anywhere when asleep. Before that she would comfort nurse for 2-3 hours and then finally go down for a 5 hour stretch and be up every hour after that. That was the "dream life." Ever since 3.5 months, she is up about 8 times per night. There are nights when she is up every 20-30 minutes for the first three hours. For the longest time she stopped even doing any stretch longer than 2 hours. However, for the past week or so I think she has done one 3-4 hour stretch in the night, with the rest of the nightly wakings every 1-1.5 hours (with the odd 30 minute only mixed in). This has been AMAZING progress for us. Yep, 8 wakings is "amazing." 😕
She nurses every time she wakes. I can sometimes rock her TO sleep at night but after that there is NO way to get her to sleep except nursing (not that I would want to be up bouncing around with her). She does a lot of comfort sucking, but she is so swallowing and getting a small feed for each of these wakings, which means she nurses more often at night than during the day.
She does not start out in her crib. If I put her in her crib, she wakes up within 20-30 minutes if not instantly. That is why I am amazed that anyone's LOs sleep in their crib for the first part of the night. Generally for the first couple hours I just let her comfort suck while I hold her until I am ready to go to bed. Again, as of very recently I can occasionally get her in bed and sneak away for an hour or so before she wakes up. She will not do this in the crib.

I do not want to co-sleep forever so I feel frustrated I can't get her in her crib. However, I barely wake up for feeds this way so it is great for coping for now. Basically I would like some hope that she would stop co-sleeping for at least half the night by the time I go back to work at 11.5 months!