Am I feeding to sleep?

[DecafCoffeePlease]

I have a 15 week old who has been in the midst of a sleep regression/growth spurt/just general crap sleep since she turned 13 weeks. Previously had been sleeping well from about 9 weeks up to feed once/twice sleeping from 7-7.

She's had a consistent bedtime routine since she was 6 weeks old and seems to understand exactly what comes next. We have bath, feed, into cot always awake. She falls asleep herself within 10/15 minutes with no grumbles. However after after particularly fraught night of waking every hour (not that this has been unusual for the past two weeks!) and only being soothed by the boob, I am starting to wonder if I actually am "feeding her to sleep" as it's the last step of our bedtime routine and it's going to be forever a sleep crutch. I always leave her to try and settle herself for a few minutes and try to soothe her in her cot before picking her up as this worked fine on the past. I then just try a cuddle and rocking but she is absolutely desperate to comfort suck and it's the only thing that will settle her.

Should I change our bedtime routine?
Should I spend more time trying to comfort her in other ways before offering her the boob?
Is this classic sleep regression? If so how can I help her through it?
Should I just keep up with the boob and accept this sleep deprivation?!

Any thoughts?!

It might be. We followed Lucy Wolfe’s book ‘The Baby Sleep Solution’, and she suggests giving your baby their last feed at least an hour before they go to bed, because otherwise it can be part of their sleep association. I honestly thought that was far fetched to start, but my baby’s sleep has improved dramatically since we followed her method.

If she’s really desperate to suck, have you tried a dummy? It didn’t work for us because my baby just spat it out every time, but it would have been so useful if he had. He has now learned to suck his own thumb which was a major game changer for his sleep - he was the same in that sucking was the only thing that soothed him, and only boobs would do.

I think if she goes into the cot awake then its not feeding to sleep. My guess would be it's just a sleep regression you have to ride out. If what you're doing worked before then I would be cautious to make big changes during a regression. Also 15 weeks is so little so I would just let her have whatever comfort she needs and definitely not worry about it being a sleep crutch yet. For what it's worth, I had similar worries about creating sleep crutches with my FF baby. Ultimately they just naturally get better at sleeping without these crutches as they get older. My previous dummy using, fed to sleep baby is now 12 months, dummy and bottle free and sleeps great.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with feeding to sleep, it's a normal biological process, not a crutch they'll use forever. She won't be 10 years old and still feeding to sleep.

Thank you for the replies. I think the intense sleep deprivation over the past fortnight just got to me and I started questioning everything!

A quick reread of some of Sarah Ockwell-Smith's sleep book gave me back some perspective and reassurance yesterday... Although that almost all went out the window at 4am after another night of hourly wake ups!

I am exhausted. It is relentless.