breastfeeding, weaning and sleep (i wish!)

[kazh1209]

Hiya Mummies,

am new to the forum and thought i would pick a few brains! My LO is seven months old on sunday and has never slept through. She still breastfeeds about five times a day (although most of these are snacking). She has three meals of about four-five ice cubes, two desserts as well. Do you think this is enough or should i offer snacks? My sister said i need to feed her to get her to sleep. She wakes every few hours and every hour after four am. She goes to bed at six with her last milk feed just before this. Am considering feeding at 4 am as i think she is hungry again then. Had cut out night feeds but she is getting worse. She also has a dummy

Any advice would be great many thanks

K x

[Anna07]

at 7.5 months my second daughter was waking every 1.5 hours in the night. Basically we had got into a bad habit whereby she wanted to feed herself back to sleep. She had never learned properly to get herself off to sleep on her own, we did controlled crying which was horrible but I was literally losing the plot and she now sleeps so much better, often sleeping for a 10 hour stretch or more in the night.

How do you get her back to sleep when she wakes, could it be she has some bad sleep associations?

My daughter was having two solid meals a day at that point and lots of snack breast feeds, but she wasn't waking from hunger as within 5 nights of doing controlled crying she was sleeping through and her eating habits hadn't changed that much. Once she slept better I found she ate better in the day and was generally a much happier baby.

Welcome to AK hope you get a decent night's sleep soon.

[DrP]

If your LO is oging to bed at 6 in the evening then it's probably a bit much to expect her to sleep right through till the following morning without some sort of feed as it's a very long time for such a young baby to go without any food. At that age my LO, who was bf, was still having a last feed around 10pm and then he'd sleep through till morning.

If she's going back to sleep without feeding most times she wakes then definitely don't get into the habit of feeding her back to sleep or you'll end up with a very hard habit to break, but I would try and introduce one more feed later in the evening to see if that will carry her through till the morning.

[fussymum]

You may find this helpful/reassuring :-
kellymom.com :: Sleeping Through the Night

[LittleMissMe]

My boy bfed until he was 13 months old and was a fab eater on top of this but didn't sleep through until I stopped breastfeeding him at night. I just had to put my foot down. However as your lo is so young, I think its a bit early to expect her to sleep through without a feed, think Dylan was having a 10pm and 4am feed at that age. Its pretty common for bfed babies not to sleep through the night until they're over a year in my experience. Sounds like you're doing a fab job though! HTH xxx

[Schmoopy]

I am still breastfeeding my 3 year old boy, and he has been very up and down with feeding patterns in his life time. When he was a newborn he woke only once at 2am, but as he got older and his needs increased he woke a bit more often. The worst time was when he woke every 90 minutes or so, that was at about 12 months. I cosleep with him, so I barely lost any sleep because I would just latch him on and then go back to sleep.

The happy ending to this story is that although we followed his lead with feeding and sleep, he now has the ability to sleep from 7pm to 7am without needing any comforting from me (he actually *asks* to go to bed most nights), and because our bed is low to the ground I leave him there until I go to bed to join him at about 10 - 11pm.

Sorry, I'm probably not much help, but I just want to show you that breastfeeding through the night can continue as long as you're happy to do it without harming their ability to learn how to sleep through the night. I don't believe you're creating a rod for your own back.

Having said that, there are certainly ways to night wean them if you choose to do that, I've heard of many women doing that successfully.