hi all
dd is 5 mths old ... from about 3 weeks till she was 3.5/4 mths she would sleep 7/8-ish till midnight/1ish, then wake at 3/4 and at 6/7. since 3.5-4 mths she is waking at 10-11ish, then 2, 4, 6, 7.30. I know there are people who have it a lot worse out there but i am shattered and also really worried because sleep has got WORSE not better and freaked out by stories of people whose babies didn't sleep till they were 2!
i've mostly just fed when she's woken, though in past week we've tried to get her through till midnight before feeding. tried cry it out -horrendous, against all my instincts to try, didn't work she cried for an hour. what mostly seems to work for her is white noise ... interestingly, if i get her through the first waking without feeding or picking up till midnight she then sometimes feeds at midnight and goes through till 3/4 then 6/7 ... but sometimes i feel i have to feed at 11ish as DH gets up for work at ridiculous o'clock and i want him to sleep.
basically, what i would really like advice/survivors' stories on is: if you take the attitude that a) this is a phase b) all babies are different and essentially sleep well when they are ready for it rather than sleep training are you dooming yourself to years of bad sleep? Are there people with older babies/toddlers out there who just waited out bad sleep phases/fed through them etc and who saw them improve naturally? If so how long did it take? And also is 4-7 mths a particularly bad time?
Oh and also, as quite often during night feeds she feeds very briefly and then goes back to sleep -does this mean she's not hungry?or just feeding more efficiently? or just a little hungry? Or what???? Oh, to understand babies better!!
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if you don't sleep train are you doomed to 2 yrs or more of broken nights?
dreamsofsleep · 12/07/2011 08:52
My DS has always been an appalling sleeper - from 3 weeks to four months he was a nightmare to settle to sleep but would do four-hour stretches, but from four months he started waking every hour or two. He did that until he was about 7.5 months and it nearly killed me. I ended up with PND from the sheer exhaustion. We tried a sleep consultant and she pretty much threw in the towel - DS reacted very badly to sleep training and just screamed and screamed - it was heartbreaking.
Around 6 months we managed to start settling him in the cot rather than rocking to sleep, but he still woke just as often. Then around 7/7.5 months we started to see the odd 3, 4 or even 5-hour stretch. One night just after 8 months he suddenly and randomly went all the way through the night - 8:30 to 5:30 
We had done nothing different to get him to do this, but around that time he had learned to roll onto his side in his sleep, and that seemed to help him. He's never done it again 
but things got better after that.
He is 9.5 months now and sleep is very random but nowhere near as bad as it was. He has never fallen asleep unassisted but this seems to make little difference to his ability to settle himself. It seems to be largely developmental with him. A good night is one waking around 3 or 4am (I just bf him back to sleep). We get that occasionally. It's not great, but a picnic compared to when he was waking hourly!
we have never done any sleep training and ds mostly sleeps through since 15m...but he's only 17m now so there's still plenty of time for it to go tits up again. 
We cosleep and i bf on demand. Ds's sleep has been through all sorts of phases, good and bad. The latter often related to developmental things going on. The book The Wonder Weeks has info on these.
Ds had a rough patch at 15m and came out of it sleeping through, mostly. He had slept through before but not for long, regular periods iyswim. He's now 17m and has had one or two rougher nights in the past week...i think he's about to go through another developmental spurt so expect some disruption but know it won't last for ever.
During these developmental spurts ds often wakes up in the night needing solids...if i can get away with just bf in bed i consider myself lucky! It p*sses me off when people say "by x months they shouldn't need bf at night". Really? So how do i force him to eat at a time i consider more convenient? He has far more important things to be doing than "stocking up" for the night.
I'm confident that ds is learning to sleep at his own pace. I'm lucky that i only work part time so have been able to just cosleep through the rough bits, cause it definatly gets worse before it gets better iyswim. But it will get better. 
naturalbaby i figure once they are 18 it is no longer my responsability to get them to sleep. 
Dreamsofsleep ime once ds cracked something (eg, crawling, rolling, walking) it got better. This took varying amounts of time. Now they seem to be more mental developments iyswim. He came out the last spurt clearly sucking up info...it was an astounding difference. I expect the new one will be language related. He seems to nearly have tons of words. But only one really..."light" 
My DS1 sounds like your DD, dreamofsleep, except that he didn't have any goods weeks, he always woke 4 or 5 times a night. It was really really tough and there were many tears - mine mainly, DS was fine so long as he was fed.
We tried sleep training when he was 6 months but it only worked for about 2 weeks and we could't face doing it again, especially when it wasn't the permanent solution others had us believe.
Despite the fact that his sleep was so erratic and there was no pattern to it other than him waking up several times a night (I kept diary for a while - it was grim reading) he suddenly started sleeping through at 10 months. There was no warning at all so it can happen at any time and without training! At that point, since I knew he could sleep through the night and clearly didn't need it, I didn't feed him during the night again so there was no more incentive to wake. Having said that, he didn't reliably sleep through every single night until 18mths but at least we knew sometimes, we would get a decent night sleep and it was bearable.
I was told at the time (DS is nearly 11 but all those night wakings aren't easily forgotten) that babies need feeding until 6 mths. Some would say longer and I was guided by DS, plus if I fed him the time awake was greatly reduced for all of us. Your DD probably still needs the feeds, even if they appear quick.
DS2 was much easier - woke twice a night, sometimes only once, fed quickly and efficiently and finally slept through all night at 8 months. Much easier to handle.
I hope it sorts itself out sooner rather than later, but it will sort itself out eventually.
We didn't sleep train and co-slept and our son is just starting to sleep through at age 3
. My brother didn't sleep train his baby and he started sleeping through aged 5 months 
- but he was ff. I think sleep is very individual, personally I didn't want to push ds into sleeping through before he was ready, nor did I want the distress associated with sleep training. I don't regret not sleep training, feel I followed my son's lead on this and will do the same with dd ( now aged 5 weeks so lots more night waking to come)!
Hi dreamsofsleep, I have a 5 month old DS who like your DD was sleeping quite well up until 3-4 months. He now has a very similiar pattern of waking to your LO. I also have a 2.8 DD who still dosen't always sleep through so have been especially keen not to repeat the same mistakes with DS. Over the last few weeks I have been trying to get him to settle himslf in his cot when he first goes to sleep as when we had managed to get DD to do this her sleep improved no end. I have also tried to only feed every 3 hours at night although I don't tend manage this as I am just too weary so just tend to end up feeding. I do find if I can stretch out his night feeds and make sure he gets both sides and doesn't just comfort suck/feed very briefly then he is more likely to last longer. If you haven't already got it the NCSS book is really good. Oh, and in contrast to some of the other posters I have found if I don't sleep in same room as him he sometimes sleeps longer, though not always. Total opposite of DD who only slept well when co-sleeping. Its the total randomness of it all that drives me nuts! Regarding the developmental thing, we found with DD that once she had achieved whatever task she was focusing on, crawling for eg, her sleep would tend to improve, but not necessarily for all that long-sorry
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