Blogging a Baby: To sleep, perchance to dream

Quin's nightly waking schedule sounds exactly like Kellan's, to the hour. Kellan is 22 months old. Sleep deprivation has become a way of life. If you find an answer, please share it, we need help! Until then I just keep telling myself that it can't be *that* much longer, "Four year olds sleep through the night -- don't they?".

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My daugther slept horribly from 5-7 months after being a champ from about 2 1/2 months to 5. Thought she must be teething, but no. Then great from 7-11, awful from 11-13 (winter illnesses, finally 6 teeth at once), OK from 13-17, then middling to crummy from 17-21 (present day--new daycare combined with 6 more teeth--seems to get them in clumps). Have you guys tried the Pantley Pull Off from the No Cry Sleep Solution for your "night time nurslings" as she calls them? It's helped us a lot. 2 weeks ago my mouse was waking up for 1-1 1/2 hours 3 times a night; now we're down to 1 or 2 times for 15 mins, hopefully on the way back to sanity!!

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I will never forget reading the baby books and them telling me to enjoy your last nights of sleeping before the baby was born, you may never sleep again. LAST NIGHTS OF SLEEPING!!! I hadnt slept through the night in almost 6 months!! I had to pee at least twice every bloody night!! When the baby came there was almost no difference in my sleeping, or lack there of.

Now she wakes up at least once, but I wake up twice, still have to bloody pee!

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Eli was also sleeping really well, especially after a trip to visit my family in October when he was four months old, and then the week before Thanksgiving he started waking up pretty much every three hours again, sometimes switching things up by waking up every hour and a half, like last night! His crib is in our room, so it's especially torturous, because for some reason he won't go back to sleep until we hide in the den for five or ten minutes, so you can imagine how messed up our sleep cycles are! It's weird, it's like I'm leading two separate lives, the daytime life as a halfway decent mother and the nightime zombie life where I know I must be doing something horribly wrong.



Keep us posted on this situation, especially if you find an answer!

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My eighteen month old son does the exact same thing. My daughter, who is now four, didn't sleep through the night until she was almost twenty months old. That was right around the time she stopped nursing. I am working on weaning my son right now. I suspect that once he is weaned, this nonsense will stop. I'm sick and tired of getting no more than four hours of sleep a night (not in a row, either!) My theory is that your little man is teething. He wakes up for comfort. That form of comfort is nursing. He goes back to sleep, but then he wets his diaper. That wakes him up. He calls you. You feed him. He goes to sleep. He wets his diaper etc. I think if he isn't fed, his diaper won't get wet and wake him up, and his digestive system won't keep him up at night. I have a blog that pretty much chronicals my nightly adventures. It's rock-a-baby.blogspot.com. You can read it if you want. I also wrote a book: That Baby Woke Me Up, AGAIN. That's the kind of crazy stuff I do when I sit in the rocking chair with my son at 3:00 in the morning! Good Luck!

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My 18 month old son went through this periodically, too. I think we worked him into getting used to us coming in to rescue him, so he wouldn't put himself back to sleep. He would put himself to sleep the first time, around 7:30, but wake up a couple of hours later. We'd go get him, put him to sleep, try to get him back in bed, he'd wake up. Repeat every two hours.



Finally, as hard as it was, we let him CIO for one night. Amazingly, we have had only two nights' worth of trouble since then, both due to teeth.



The other thing is that I finally figured out to really listen to him before I jump up to get him. He'd cry out for a good 5 minutes sometimes, but never really wake up. He'd quiet down on his own.



Hope you figure out what works for you!!!

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Rachel's comment (#6) mentions letting her baby CIO. Did the others who commented do that also? I'm sure it'll come back to bite me, but our son has been sleeping a solid 12 hours every night for months now. Around 4 months, he started waking once a night for a feeding and around 5 months he stopped completely. Oh, he still wakes because I hear him mumbling in the middle of the night, but he goes right back to sleep. As hard as the two or three nights were to let him CIO (and he only cried for 10 minutes but it is still really difficult to listen to), it was the best thing we could have done for him. Other moms I know seem to have similar experiences. If they taught the baby to self-soothe, they are in sleep heaven. If they haven't, they can't remember their last good night's sleep and are still waking every 1-1/2 hours.



Of course, having said that, we haven't been on vacation yet and I know for some friends that was what changed their sleeping baby to a non-sleeping baby. My fingers are crossed that when we do go out of town in a couple months nothing will change.

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In response to the cry-it-out method, I tried that with my eighteen-month-old son. He cried from midnight to 5:00 AM (the time I nursed him) for five nights. Finally, I decided that enough is enough. I thought that the crying was supposed to get better each day. That definitely was not the case with my son! I posted a comment a couple of days ago, saying that I'm working on weaning my son. I thought that would help him sleep. He now goes from 9:30 PM to 4:30 AM without a feeding. The only trouble is, when he wakes up around 11:30 PM, he doesn't want to go back to sleep unless I bring him down to the sofa and sleep with him (that's where I did the CIO thing to try to get him to sleep in his crib). I really don't know what to do with him. I'll try to get out the 9:30 feeding and then work on the 4:00 one. We'll see what happens after that. By the way, he does sleep from 11:30 to 4:00 without waking up now.

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