Help, I have become a human dummy

[genia]

Hi
My baby is 13 months old and still breastfed. He is still fed to sleep both for his naps (2 a day) and at night. That wouldn't be SO bad (even if not ideal - especially the daytime naps) but he also wakes up at night and goes back to sleep drinking milk. I am kicking myself for not having tried harder to do something about the night feeding sooner but at the time I was REALLY tired etc... Now he has become even more self-willed obviously and has taken to wanting to suck for long periods at night as his sleep gets lighter and it gets closer to morning. My ultimate goal, starting with getting rid of the night feeding is to get him down to two long breastfeeds a day - one first thing in the morning and one before bed at night. Does anybody have any advice on how to do this - I can't see the wood for the trees!!!
Thank you.

Hi Yuyee
Thanks for your message. I'd seen your posts in the sleep section also. We are still in the the same situation, some nights are ok, others not. At the moment ds has gastroenteritis so everything is topsy turvy anyway.
The only thing I would say is that looking back I think it would probably have been easier to do something about ds's sleep habits if we had tried before he became so alert and intelligent (he is not 14.5 months old), even though at the time the idea was scary.
Have you thought of trying a sleep clinic? Somebody I knew did with very good results.

genia, we live in the US so I'm not sure what the sleep clinics there do. We went to the Ferber sleep center here in Boston. The doctor there assessed dd's physicals and developments and said she's healthy and the only problem is with sleep association. He recommended using Ferber's CC with her.

We did try it and saw some success/failures. She did go to sleep but still woke up crying the same number of times. My dh and I decided that we couldn't go through with it in the middle of the second night after she cried for about an hour and didn't sleep for another 1/2 hr after that. Also, we weren't sure we did it right by stopping the feeding so suddenly (that's what the doctor suggested) because Ferber's book actually said we should night wean her first. I know we tried it too soon. Now we'll try to night wean her first.

Today I've started to put her to naps awake. The morning nap she just kept crying and decided not to sleep. But in the afternoon she cried for 5 min then stopped. I checked 7 min after that and she was asleep (gasp!!). Then she woke up at her normal 30 min mark, cried for 3 min and went back to sleep!! I guess it's working. This is a miracle by itself!