does sleeping through the night really mean sleeping through the night?

[muslimah28]

ive read lots on sleeping through the night and my question is this- does it really mean that your lil one actually sleeps through the whole night? because everything i can see says that eg a 7 til 7 routine still requires a feed at 10pm and possibly another night feed. so how is that really sleeping through the night? it does sound like a nice routine and i did get DS on it for a while until he decided to go through a sleep regression, but i just wanted to ask this question as i want to know if sleeping through the night is not exactly what it seems...

How old is your DS?

For me, 'sleeping through the night' was from 11pm till 7am (because it meant I could have 8hrs sleep too) but some people would say 7pm-7am (or similar). Waking for a feed in the middle of the night is not sleeping through IMO.

FWIW my DTs slept 11-7 at 3mths and 7-7 some nights from about 6mths but not consistently till 12m (and I used sleep training techniques).

hes 13 weeks. from5 weeks i had him sleeping in a predictable way.itwasn't timed by the clock but i had him on 2 hourly feeds and then 3 hourly feeds (which we're still on now). the next feed was determined by when the last was so ifit was delayed for any reason we timed it fromthat. he fell into this pattern well and i could always work out when he would wake up in the night from how the day had gone, which was good enough for me.

but for 2 weeks now he's totally gone off his pattern and is fighting sleep and not sleeping well at all. the last couple of days have started to get a bit better so i think maybe he had a sleep regression and is hopefully going out of it....

but iw as asking out of curiousity too as to how people see this issue...

In the world of babies I consider anything from 10/11 until after 6 sleeping through. In adult life that's practically torture :)

I think medically it's supposed to be 5 or 6 hours. But as cat64 says, everyone has a different idea. The 10/11 thing often assumes you do a dreamfeed while the baby is asleep to help them stay asleep for longer.

And different people think differently about sleep. I would far rather my DS slept 7-7 but with one waking than sleeping 7-5.30 straight through. No chance of him doing either though. :)

I had heard that it was 5+ hours.
I agree with Angel, all night with one waking was far easier than straight through but with early waking.

four years on and i'm still waiting

id be so happy with 5-6 hours again... i had that from weeks 5 to 11 but now hes not interested... but the good news is, going by the 'weigh in' yesterday, that this is probably a growth spurt, so maybe he'll settle back to his previous routine.

the most annoying thing of all right now is that i bought him an amby natures nest hammock on ebay as i think that will really help his sleep (he loves falling asleep in a sling and just generally loves snuggling which the hammock mimics)- but after having agreed with the seller to dispatch so that i receive on thursday he now hasn't done that and i have to wait until monday if id known that i would have just bought a new one on kiddicare!