It's not going to get better for a long time is it?

[mamakim]

Dd is 5 months on tues and at 6 months i'm going to start BLW her. She's still feeding every two hours day and night. My ds has started waking too in the night and i feel like a zombie. It's just dawned on me that it's not going to get better anytime soon because with blw she's going to be getting much in the way of calories from food.

Maybe blw isn't such a good idea. I need some sleep!

[pippel]

do you co sleep? I found that much easier

[cyteen]

I don't think either way of weaning can be relied upon to improve sleep, tbh - in the early days most babies don't get a lot of calories from their solid food no matter how it's given. I believe 4-6 months is classic sleep deprivation time, with clockwork waking and ravenous feeding - it certainly was for me - so I really sympathise.

[CatIsSleepy]

tbh am doing the puree thing with my 6 and a half month old and it hasn't made that much difference to her sleep! some nights ok, some nights bad-same as ever...

[lilymolly]

oh bless you.

My ds still feeds every 2 hours during the day, but at night he only gets fed once any time between 3-5am. All other waking times he gets settled by either me (unlikely as I wear ear plugs) or dp with a dummy.
Sometimes he wakes every 2 hours other times he just wakes once.

We tried BLW at 5 months when the problem started, but like you say he did not really get much calorific food into his tummy, so we then tried introducing spoon fed food which he refused to take so we are now at 6 months and he is still predominantly blw, with the odd spoonfull of our food which he sometimes takes, as long as he feeds himself

As long as I am only waking up a couple of times a night I can cope with life.

How old is your ds?

[tiktok]

????

But weaning is really and truly unconnected with sleep.

Giving babies more calories than they actually need does not make them sleep - at least there is no evidence that it does. Individual experience may be that co-incidentally, a baby on solids starts to stay asleep, but it is likely to be co-incidence.

Babies wake in the night this age because it is developmentally normal to do so. Culturally, we don't like it. But Nature does not care! One option is to accept it and make night wakings and settlings as easy as possible for you.

You can teach babies to wake and self settle - my feeling is this cannot be done very kindly until the baby is rather older than 5 mths, though.

What do you think?

[pippel]

I taught my very little second dd to self settle because I didn't want to have to use cc like I did with dd1

it can be done kindly I used the ideas in the no cry sleep solution

[mamakim]

I semi co sleep but i don't feel like i get very good quality sleep when she's in bed with me. TicTok the reason i think it's connected is because that's the experience i had with ds. Plus friends doing the traditional puree weaning have been doing so from around 4 months and are being filled with quite alot of babyrice etc by now. (not that i'd do that - but i am envious of the sleep!)

I imagine i should be trying to settle her other ways than feeding her but my 2yr ds is such an unsettled sleeper recently i am terrified that if she cries for a nano second it'll wake him and then i have that to contend with too (he doesn't want dh at all at the mo, just me - oh so popular in the middle of the nigh i am!)

I just can't see an end in sight at all. I was getting 8 hours sleep at this stage with ds, but yeah i know they're all different.

[kathryn2804]

Baby rice will not make them sleep. And there is nothing nutritious in it at all! Mine started sleeping through when they were on 3 good meals a day, but I don't think it was so much the food intake that did it, but that they were developmentally ready to do so.

i don't think you can start sleep training for a little while longer.

Babies have a growth spurt at about 5 mths so she might be doing this!! In which case, it shouldn't last. Fingers crossed.

[mamakim]

kathryn i wish! She's been feeding 2 hourly day and night for 12 weeks! It's just my ds waking too that's compounded it. Plus just feeling as though there is no light at the end of the tunnel.