Maine Nesties
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
s/o baby sleep
Abe had been doing really well for about a week where he would sleep for 6 hours, eat, then sleep another 4 hours. Now we are up every two hours. He was sick so I can't blame him but now that he is feeling better I want to work on getting us back on a good sleep schedule.
My questions:
1. What time did your 3 month old go to bed?
2. How many times a night were you feeding?
3. If baby woke up in the middle of the night did you feed him/her every time?
I put Abe on the boob each time he wakes up and he goes right back to sleep. Now I'm thinking that it is creating a vicious cycle. He is getting fairly good at self soothing. This week we have been putting him down drowsy and he puts himself to sleep.
I'm sleepy.
Re: s/o baby sleep
It could be a growth spurt, but if he's falling asleep within 5-10 minutes of being on the boob, he might just be nursing himself back to sleep. Some babies have a harder time self-soothing at night than they do for naps. Nighttime is just a needier time. Sounds like he is doing an AWESOME job with the self-soothing though initially falling asleep though!
That's a big one. To answer your questions:
1. Sometime between 8-9 (he was a night owl - still is)
2. At 3 months he just started sleeping through the night, don't know why, never questioned it, just thanked our lucky stars! It was at 6 months that he started waking frequently during the night and I started nursing him back to sleep again, thus starting a horrible habit that really lent to the reasons we had to Ferber. I suck, but I was doing what I thought was right (and I was desperate for sleep!)
3. Yes, I fed him as I admitted above.
I have a friend right now with a 4 month old that is just going in if it's before 3 a.m., shushing and patting and telling him he's okay, picking him up if necessary (like crying hysterically) putting him back down when he's calmed down and leaving the room. If it's 3 am or after, she feeds him. He goes to bed at 8. She's hoping to fade that feeding out at 6 months.
I know our pedi said babies are usually ready to sleep through the night when they double their birth weight or reach 15 pounds. But again, you have to just trust your instincts and decisions and do what you feel is right and best for Abe the Babe! You might just have to choose when to feed. Mainer went through cutting down on the frequency of feedings. She'll be a good one to talk to!
at 3 months, Felix just started to sleep through the night too.
Felix would eat at 6 or 6:30 and then he was/is usually in bed around 7. He'll sleep until 11 and then Ryan will wake him to eat. Then, he'll go back to sleep until 6 (sometimes 7 and those days are so wonderful!)
When Felix would wake in the middle of the night I usually fed him, towards the end of his middle of the night wakings, I noticed that he ate a lot less. So then I started decreasing the amount I was giving him, and just trying to soothe him to sleep first. The soothing on its own rarely worked, but that magic day finally happened where he just dropped the 4am feeding.
At 3 months, my boys were waking up about twice a night for bottles. They would go down between 7-8, wake up around 12 and then 3, then up for the day at 6.
Now, (this is just in the past month), they go down anywhere from 6:30 - 8, and sleep until 5:30 - 6:00. Sometimes later.
3 months was when Gaby started to sleep though the night as well (most of the time). When she had her first bad cold and bad cough, she was up a bunch and I went in and nursed her, but after she got better, I started going in and just giving her the pacifier to settle her instead of nursing, since i knew she had made it through the night without a feeding before, so she probably didn't need it. Then I gradually didn't give her the pacifier and just rubbed her back and shushhed a little. I think within a week or a bit more she was back to sleeping through.
Good luck!!
Another thing to consider is how much he eats during the day at daycare. That will affect how much he needs to eat at night. Marcus reverse cycled meaning he only ate about 12 oz during the day at daycare and made up for it by waking through the night to get the rest of the calories he needed. I generally would pump 12-15oz a day and even when I made bigger bottles or sent more, he would still stick to only 12 oz (and sometimes less). I could have cut out the night feedings in hopes that he would eat more during the day and sleep better at night, but that would have meant I would have needed to pump more which I didn't want to do. So for us, I let him reverse cycle and nursed him at night, so I didn't have to pump more. If Abe isn't eating much at night, maybe you could feed him more during the day to help him sleep better at night if you've got the milk to spare and he'll take it.
MA. You are brilliant. I was just pumping and it occured to me that maybe he needs to eat more during the day. I just did some calculations and he is consuming between 10 and 13 oz at school. He sleeps a lot more at school than at home...thus eating less at school. I am pumping more than he is eating so I will try making fuller bottles. (DCP said that sometimes he seems upset when the bottle is gone...he is getting 3.5oz.)
Last night I tried soothing him instead of putting him right on the boob. When I reached over him for the paci he latched onto my hand...telling me that he was hungry!