BF babies and sleeping through...

[Yorkiegirl]

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Yorkiegirl - you've got ace advice here - stick to your guns. Never ceases to amaze me how people want to stick their oar in where babies are concerned.

Babies will sleep through when they're good and ready. My own dd was fully breastfed, no solids till 6 months and she started doing 12 hours straight through without waking from 5 1/2 months. So much of it is just luck.

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Yorkiegirl, just to add my experience. DD is 11 weeks, doesn't really go to bed before I do, so has a feed around 10.30/11 pm and then wakes around 3/4/5 (6 if I'm lucky!) for the next feed. So she sleeps for about the same stretch as your dd. I don't get the 2 am waking, but I do sometimes get fed up of not getting an evening to myself (it'll come though).
It's swings and roundabouts isn't it. Sounds like you're doing great

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have to say I spend at least £30 a month extra on food when bf. cheesecake, chocolate, bread and butter pudding.....

I would have been OVERJOYED if my ds had slept as well as your dd at that age. He woke up at all hours and - horror! - stayed awake eg wide awake and wanting to be held from, say, 2am until 5am. Or he would wake every 40 minutes to an hour, and then do his big wake as well. Sometimes he was breastfed, and sometimes, as I was on my knees with exhaustion and had to have dh take over, he was bottlefed. It never made a jot of difference to his sleep. I think you are extremely lucky to have a baby who sleeps so well, and I simply do not believe that everyone you know has 12 week old babies who sleep 12 hours a night. I think they are either lying or keeping quiet.
As for you Pupuce

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I'll admit that at your stage I was desperate to drop the 2am feed. DD1 very suddenly got the hang of sleeping through (leaving me lactating madly and painfully at 2am for six weeks ). DD2, sadly, is not nearly such a good sleeper but I used to feed her at 10.30 and then found she would take a dummy in the small hours(not as a subsitute breast, but because she was used to it as a sleep cue). It's all up to what you can cope with, IMO.

Yorkiegirl,

I rarely write...too shy...but I have to make a comment here.
I think you are great keeping up bfing. I know how strong the pressure to give up can be, believe me, I live on the Green Isle!
My DS is 8 months old now, still bfed when he wakes and before bed. He has been sleeping through the nights since he was 11 weeks old (from 8pm to 7am). At times when I was completely wrecked by the end of the day to bf, my DH gave him a bottle.
Fair enough, if the baby is really hungry (s)he will wake for feeds at night, but otherwise I think it is just up to the baby not up to the feeding method.
It might be worth trying though to express milk for your DD and get her tonked with a full bottle of expressed milk to her before bed to see if she gets hungry after that too.

Yorkie : "mums do exaggerate about how well their babies sleep sometimes".... I think it is more that one woman's definition of "sleeping through" varies from another.
I often get told by my clients "my baby slept though last night".... and when they actually describe it.... it was midnight to 5 AM for example.... but for them that's great and that is what matters ! Not what others think!!!!

yorkiegirl - just wanted to reiterate a comment from fairyprincess. If your DH is under pressure at work and really needs his sleep get him some earplugs. My DH wears them and although if DD cries properly it does wake him, her snuffles and wriggling in the cot and noisy sucking don't affect him. Quite often she has woken me well before she reaches full crying and I've fed her and he hasn't woken.

And then he's more amenable to evening chores.

Just reading through the thread. My 7 week old dd sleeps 'through'. She went to bed at 9:30pm last night and I eventually woke her at 7:30am. My mantra is let a sleeping baby lie. She is not interested (at the moment) in being fed at night so waking her would be a waste of time.

She only cat naps during the day and nothing I do makes her sleep for longer than a 1/2 hour at a time about 4 times a day. But I won't complain. I prefer her to sleep at night because nothing makes me more irritable than lack of sleep.

She is only breast fed but seems to be gaining weight and is much much happier after a night of long uninterrupted sleep. When she was waking before, she just cried ALL day.

the baby whisperer mentions offering the dummy to replace a night feed or some water. it could be that the 2am feed is now habit and after a few nights of the dummy being given, they stop waking. Dont know if it works though.

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I am impressed by the regularity of my dd's night wakes, which come every 3 hours on the nose. To me this is an indication that she is really hungry and that's how long her system takes to digest a meal. Less predictable is how well she'll settle afterwards - That's the jamminess factor too I reckon. (She is 8 weeks.) I can't quite get putting her down at a regular hour but whether awake or asleep her stomach ticks on unstoppably like a little engine. On the one hand I can't wait for her to sleep through. On the other I am resigned to the wakes because they are what I understand.

I think it's one of those things where you and your child have to balance your two sets of needs and preferences. So hard to trust your instincts sometimes.