Night time weaning at 6mo

[Firelilly67]

Good morning All,

My daughter is 6mo and a large baby. She's always been on 98th percentile, so she's in the region of 20lbs. As such she started weaning about a month ago and takes her solids really well with about as much breast as she was getting before (all good). The weaning has seemed to help her sleeping a bit.

The problem is that a few months ago she got a cold, and went from sleeping through the night, to waking every hour for a feed because she needed comforting and had a dry mouth (plus, feed a cold, right!?). Anyway, since then she has developed a habit of waking up twice in the night, at 1 and at 4.

Both times she will NOT settle until she is fed. I have tried giving her water, she might settle for 10 mins (max) but then she'll be up again. I've tried doing pick-up-put-down, again, she will settle for a maximum of 10 mins. I have also tried just settling her in her cot, same story. The last few nights I have been trying to give her just a little bit less milk at her night time feed (about 1 minute less), now she is just waking up more often! Little tinker.

She eats so much I just can't believe she would still be hungry! I'm just too tired to keep up with these things that aren't working! Does anyone else have any tips to help her sleep through the night, after all, she did used to do it!

Any advice at all would be much appreciated, or if there is anyone out there going through the same thing perhaps we can moan together!?? Haha ;-)

Thanks mummies xxx

Hi Firelilly73, my daughter was the same, a big girl but always woke for a few night feeds, actually she would do this until we did something about it at 15mo. As you can imagine I was exhausted.

The problem is if you carry on feeding in the night their tummy's get used to the feed and so they wake up habitually. My daughter would not take no for an answer and would get so upset if I refused to feed her.

I couldn't leave her to self soothe for various reasons, so in the end my husband decided he'd do night duty. It took a few days, but she was soon sleeping through the night. If you're interested I blog about my daughter's sleep troubles and this post describes how we overcame this particular problem mydaughterwontsleep.com/2014/02/06/is-breast-best-when-it-comes-to-sleep-apparently-not/ Good luck with it all! Best wishes.

If you have constantly tried water and pick up and neither have worked. Then I would say she IS waking from hunger.

Feeding patterns do change their need for milk changes as they grow. Just because she slept through at one point doesn't mean she doesn't need milk at night now. Lots of solid during the day can actually be a issue if she taking to many. They can't actually digest much from food to start with and still need a lot of milk, so if she's talking to much solids she maybe waking for milk at night to make up for lost milk in the day. You could try getting her to take more milk during the day. Adding a dream feed around 10pm could give you a longer block of sleep, works for.some people.

I would never expect a six month old to be able to sleep 12 hours some can. But in my experience they tend to be the exception rather then the norm. Babies are biologically programmed to sleep lightly and wake a lot over night.

At 6 months my ds went from sleeping thru the night to waking up between 2-4am so I fed him, it only lasted a few weeks then he slept thru again. He sometimes wakes up not crying just awake i pat him and if he doesn't go back to sleep after about a couple of minutes, I feed him. He's 8 months.
I go by the theory they are changing all the time and kind of just run with it.

There is a growth spurt at 6 months so believe it or not she really might be hungry!

I found that DD needed 1 or 2 night feeds at 6 months but by 7.5 months she was ready for night weaning - she was only having very brief night feeds and was eating loads of solids. She hasn't been fed in the night since (apart from a couple of weeks at about 10.5 months when she had another growth spurt). Hang in there, it won't be long!

I think theres less calories in solids than milk.
I never found weaning helped with sleeping through. We night weaned using CIO at 11m when she was sleeping through from patting back to sleep but that was several times a night.

My dd had a horrible cough and cold virus at about 6 months and did exactly as yours has (though I bottle feed). It took about 3 weeks but she settled down and went back to sleeping through - virus combined with growth spurt.

I would try as others have suggested cutting down on the amount of solids in the day amd making sure she gets more milk. My dd manages a bowl of porridge, a quarter of a sandwich at lunch and a few ella's kitchen cheese puffs and then about 2 desert spoons of puree ofor tea - we are starting toothy more blw stuff so she then has a 2-3 carrot sticks or a bit of broccoli, or 2 quarters of a slice of toast but still takes 4-5 7oz bottles a day