Two Nighttime Questions: bedtime and middle of the night waking

[tigermiep]

Help, o wise Mamas (and Papas and others)!

1. How have you worked with helping an always-nursed-to-sleep baby to learn to fall asleep in other ways? Boyo is 15 months, and he will fall asleep in my DP's arms or in his car seat, but with me, he nurses to sleep. This is fine, except for the nights he decides he doesn't want to nurse, which means he won't be going to sleep any time soon....

2. Boyo wakes up in the night and takes a long, long time to get back to sleep. Usually it's between 1 and 3 hours, most often 2. He will fall asleep nursing, but wake when I try to lay him in his bed, immediately fall back into a light sleep, and the wake again if I try to lay him down. This sometimes goes on for 6 or 8 tries, until either I take him back to bed to sleep on me, or he finally is deeply enough asleep to stay asleep. Any suggestions? He's been sleeping in his own room since 7 months, as DP and I both snore and were waking him, and bedsharing is fine with us on occasion, but causes such neck and shoulder pain for me, I can't do it for more than a couple nights in a row and still function.


thank you!!

[rachelernst]

Sara:

I see this was just a month ago. Have you had any relief. Oh, I remember those days with my son V, who you will likely meet in the Fall :-)
I can't say I have any specific advice. I do empathize with the neck and shoulder pain related to co-sleeping.

Some thoughts:

I ended up nursing babies to sleep laying down so they were already on the bed and then I could roll off and leave them. This became an integral feature of my nighttime parenting. There was a progression with both of my babies in which they slept on a queen sized mattress on the floor. When they started to learn to crawl, I taught them "feet first" keyword for the way of going backwards off the mattress onto the floor. This taught them the keyword so that when they would go down stairs (or playground equipment or anything else like a couch) I could say "Feet first" and they would go backwards--yes, sometimes I could actually see them contemplate going head down first and then switch tactics if I said the keyword! So, they fell asleep in a separate room on mattress on floor, door closed and a baby monitor set to wake me up if I heard noise. Once they learned how to open the door, it could bea litty hairy, because that room was upstairs. Once I knew they could come down stairs reliably, I started coaching them in the middle of the night to come down stairs feet first. Over time, they learned to do it automatically. I operated on the idea that they wanted to be asleep, so I minimized any talking to them and we went right back to bed in my bed. We then finished out the night in my own bedroom, nursing and all. I'm not sure this was all worth it, but I guess I felt so at the time, in order to get SOME time sleeping alone, and to allow for the progression toward independence. Now, my kids both will sleep most of the night and then come down and crawl into my bed. We coached my son through using the toilet middle of night, so he started doing that automatically by age 5. Both of mine (a boy and a girl) nursed some at night all the way until the time that I began mama-led weaning (age 2 and 3 consecutively). I started weaning both at night, which might be backward as I think it may be more difficult to do at night. During the day you have more distractions you can offer.

Another advantage of the extra room with a mattress on floor is that you can go there instead of have them come to you... and I had many phases like that, too. With this, you can let them wake and crawl around the room while your eyes roll back in your head. I just kept the room dark, used an ocean sounds CD. I tried times of rocking them back to sleep trying to refuse or limit their nursing, but of course they didn't like that. When my daughter was 3 and I was committed to weaning, I offered her something akin to the "special rich weaning foods" (I read that phrase in a La Leche League book on a page about world weaning practices)--I offered her some foods she didn't want and then she asked for some cookies (Organic Oreo type). I decided it was worth it! She's never had a cavity. I gave her oreos for awhile, sang a lot of sons in delerium, and discovered that she loves to have her skin "drawled" on. Most noteably, she wanted the contact with me and she came up with a solution: pull up our shirts and be belly-to-belly as she falls back asleep--I rolled her off as soon as she was back to sleep. She still likes to be on my belly/chest, a year later, but it is for much less amount during the night (like mostly just in the early a.m. to fall back asleep and then I roll her off).

A friend tells me that the sleep between 9-midnight is most restorative, and far more necessary than the sleep you get after midnight. So, retrospectively, I should have been going to bed earlier every night.