Anyone successfully ended all night nursing without night weaning?

[PenguinsandtheTantrumofDoom]

DS is our third, and I seem to be breeding successively worse sleepers.

DD1 I did everything 'right', but by 11 months she was often spending up to 3 hours of every night awake and screaming, whatever we did. At which point I broke and sleep trained her. She slept through, but was an early riser for a good few months further.

DD2 woke every 2 hours until 18 months, but settled easily after a feed ,finally sleeping through at 2.

DS is awful. He goes to bed awake after a feed and happily goes to sleep, but through the night is up and down like a yo yo and only a feed will calm him back to sleep. We co-sleep after the first couple of wakes. I think last night he was awake about a dozen times between 11 and 7.

He's 7 months and I have no expectation of him sleeping through. But if I could just be up a couple of times it would make such a difference to our quality of life all round. This morning I realised that, after parking the car, I had sat staring into space for a full 10 minutes.

Does anyone have any suggestions? It obviously isn't hunger and he eats and drinks well in the day, so I don't think any form of 'tanking him up' will help.

Have a look at Jay Gordon's night weaning? I probably wouldn't do it that young but I sort of adapted it with both of mine. Both continued (youngest still bfing) way past being night weaned. Much older though like I said.

Can I ask what you adapted? Given he says over 1 doesn't he? (sorry, told you I was sleep deprived. Can't think for myself )

Oh there are lots of ways of adapting it. You might not bedshare so you may want to introduce different ways of settling them in a cot/bed alongside dropping the milk. You may likewise choose to do it for a shorter/longer period of time overnight and then adapt as you go along.

My main adaptations were that from the beginning of night weaning, I didn't feed in the night like he suggested at first. I introduced a new rule that bfing was for in a certain chair and not in bedrooms/in bed. We had coslept and fed on demand up to that point and I'd slowly been removing the breast before the dc were asleep for a while (Pantley pull off is useful here if you've heard of it, if not google). I knew they could fall asleep without feeding which was my cue for starting night weaning. They were both 2 when I did it too so more than ready to understand what was happening and it was only one, maybe two feeds per night! I allowed as much milk as they wanted before midnight and they could feed almost to sleep but would settle the last bit themselves. Next BF wasn't until we were up out of bed for the day. Both adapted very quickly indeed and there was no crying.