Please please help me!! No sleep, ever!!

[AgathaRaisin]

This has prob been asked a million times before now but I have a 6 mth old still not sleeping through. Average wake ups per night range from 2 - in xcess of 10. Has a dummy (wish had never used as first baby never had one), think she loses it in sleep and cries until has it back. Do I remove dummy all together day and night?, Control cry at night, honestly at a loss and feel beyond shattered! Any magic cures out there?

We had this and took dummy away. First night was hard, then babies learned to self-soothe and woke only for the feed.

Eventually, you will need to stop night feeds if you want her to sleep through the night. It might be an idea to do that first and then deal with the dummy when she is used to going through the night without a feed.

I think you need to think of the bigger picture with dummies...half of me wishes I had taken it away at 5/6 months as I now have a 19 month old who won't give it up and the other half of me wonders how the hell I would have survived without it as I have never really had lots of crying etc as he always settled so fast wherever we were!

However, I feel your pain as DH and I used to paper, scissors, stone who had to get out of bed to plug the dummy back in again during the night...

If you want to keep it, I can suggest a couple of useful tips that eventually worked for us!

1. I invested in an airwrap cot bumper (don't know how to link - sorry!) and then littered the cot with dummies. My DS learnt very quickly how to find one by scrabbling around!

1. I also got a dummy clip and attached it to his sleeping bag.

Just another thought, is your LO having enough to eat/drink during the day so that she doesn't need to feed at night?

Good luck - I hope things improve soon

We give her a last bottle at about 10pm ish. Funnily the first 'half' of the night passes without wakeup - she goes to bed perfectly with no fuss as we have est a routine of bath, feed, bed from day one. The 'fun' starts after midnight, seems this has now become her 'routine'. Addictedtofrazzles - have checked out that bumper site and am giving it a serious think!! Thanks

ds1 fed 2 hourly 24/7 until 10 mos. when i stopped feeding him at night, he stopped waking up to be fed. it took two nights.

dd1 had a dummy - we took it away at 12mos (her b-day present lol). she slept through from that point

dd2 was an ex-scbu baby, and we had to wake her to feed her... she had a lot of feeding issues and couldn't feed during the day as her muscle tone was so high. she became a nocturnal feeder for most of the first year as it was the only way she could swallow...

it will get better, honestly.

I can recommend a book called 'teach youself baby sleep' by andrea grace.

Thanks for all your advice!! Will try anything, here's hoping!!

Hi AgathaRaisin

I posted a sleep related question here a few days ago and one helpful soul pointed me in the direction of the "sleep" section of the forum (thank you that person ). I hadn't noticed it - maybe you haven't either? It's in the Body and Soul section; not where I would have initially thought to look. But there might be more there that can help you as well as any responses you get here. Good luck!