21wk old bedtime nightmare-need help!

[forpitysake]

Baby is 21wks. When shes awake shes happy, alert, feeds well etc. We gave her a dummy to help settle her a few times. This has now turned into every time she goes to sleep. This is fine by me for now. she doesnt have it when shes awake. Its just for sleep. I really want to get rid of it though as she can wake up with it dropping out of her mouth which means i cant just pop her down & leave her to sleep unless i want to be running up & down stairs to keep putting it back in. I have to do this a few times some naps and it drives me insane. if she stirs overnight enough to wake herself up then it starts all over again. It has sometimes taken over an hour overnight. Shes desperate to get back to sleep & she doesnt need nappy change & isnt too hot/cold etc. Id made my mind up that it had to go to save my sanity &sleep. I always put her down before shes overtired but she has gone so absolutely ballistic for it ive been in tears and given in. Ive wasted my time trying. Ive got both of us upset and shes still got the bloody thing. I dont know what to do. I need the sleep overnight. My eldest had a toy she sucked instead whdn i took her dummy away. I didnt like this or encourage it but the dummy hadnt worked with her anyway and we didnt have the overnight problem either. Im sure if i was brave enough to tide it out then she maybe would have cried herself to sleep?? I was trying the leave it for a short while then try & settle then a tiny bit longer then settle etc but she wasnt intetested. I couldnt settle her. She was already gearing herself up and couldnt even hear me shushing. Picking her up when she was raging made her worse. Putting her back down was worse again so i gave in. Im just sitting here crying. I do.t know what to dowith her

Sorry it is so hard for you right now. I think 21 weeks is still very little and it sounds as if she has learned how to use the dummy to self settle but doesn't know any other ways of doing it. Don't feel bad for "giving in" to her. I think it was the right thing to do. Hopefully others will be along soon with ideas on how to deal with the dummy longer term.

My son used dummy when he was small. He got his first dummy when he was 2 weeks old, because he had an operation and the nurse preferred to use dummy. I did not mind, because it helped him to settle down. It caused problem for us through the night, because he was small and could not find his dummy, so he needed help. But he was sleeping in our bedroom until he was 8-9 month old. So as soon as I heard the he misses his dummy I got up and put it back to his mouth. When he moved to another room, I used a sting to knot the dummy to his bed, next to his face, so he started to learn to find his dummy. When I thought it is time to leave the dummy (when he was around 3 years old), I told him that dummy tastes different in big boys? mouth, than in babies? mouth and soon he will feel it. We spoke about this every day for a week or so, than I put his dummy into lemon juice and he was very proud, because he thought he became a big boy. He tried to ask for the dummy a couple of times, and I gave it to him, but I always put it into lemon juice before I gave it to him.
I think there are 2 things you can do. Leave as it is and she will find her dummy and put back into her mouth in a few weeks? time. Take off the dummy from her, cope with her crying for a couple of days, but if you will do this I think she will be clever enough to find her own finger and will put her finger into her mouth. And it will harder for you later to teach her not to put her finger into her mouth. Babies do not have ?long term? memory before that age of 6 month that is why she cannot remember where her dummy is when sleeping. After the age of 6 month she will learn to remember and if you show her a couple of times she will find her dummy herself.
Hope everything goes well.