Help - dummy addiction!

[stellamac]

Hi all,
I have a 3 and a half month old. It was taking about an hour plus to soothe her to sleep as we didn't want to leave her crying. Decided to give her a dummy and she LOVES it, doesn't cry in her cot anymore and worked a treat for the first few days. The last two nights however, she has decided she doesn't want to sleep. She seems to be waking up all the time and I think she is looking for her dummy. I have not had a stretch of sleep more than 2.5 hours and the past few nights I have brought her in with us at 5am so I can get a least a couple of hours of sleep.

What do you think I should do? Do you think this is something that might pass or has anyone had a similar experience and has given up using a dummy?

Any advice grateful!
xx

My Dt's had dummy's so that we could sleep. One of them spat it out at 3months the other continues to use it at bed time.

If she spits is out I just place it where she can reach it, I figure she'll give it up when she is ready.

Sorry, it's long but hope it's useful. I had the exact same problem as you at the exact same age. I can't give you advice as all babies are different but here's what happened with my situation. Our DS took a dummy straight away, absolutely loved it, he hardly cried as a newborn as he was so,so content sucking it day and night. About 3 months and lots of night wakings (more and more all the time) we realised that we were continually getting up to pop the dummy back in his mouth. He would fall asleep only to wake again an hour later crying and wouldn't stop until he had his dummy. We realised ( I think this is what was happening) that when he came into his light sleep stage every 45 min or 1.5 hours he'd wake as he'd realise something" was wrong/different" from when he fell asleep happily sucking. Basically the dummy had become his sleep aid, something he couldn't fall back asleep without. Leaving me 2 choices. 1- continue the broken sleep and dummy fetching until 7-8 months when they can learn to find it and put it back in their own mouth or 2- go cold turkey and hope he'd be able to put himself back to sleep without it eventually. The lack of sleep finally got to me and feeling very guilty, as I knew how much he loved them ( but I was falling apart without the decent sleep we all need) I packed up his dummies( ALL of them) and gave them to a sympathetic friend. It took a few nights but what happened really surprised me, he was quite fretful but a bit of very very consistent shush shush, pat pat really worked when he woke up at night. It made him feel better that I was there, but the real truth of the matter is, he quickly found his thumb, which is what really made the difference. I suspect your baby would find her thumb too. he's 5.5 months now, has been sleeping through ever since 7:30pm-7:00am ( in fact its a helpful sleep cue, whenever he's really tired , the thumb goes in and i put him straight to bed) and I've never had to give him a dummy although I'm sure he'd be very happy indeed if I did!! Good luck!