FATE - can you advise me please?

[Sparrowlegs248]

As you have done many times now....

Just reading on another thread re 4 month 'regression' and wanted to ask a couple of questions without hijacking that thread.

You mention working on getting baby to take a dummy. Any tips on how? I tried with DS from about 5weeks. He's 16weeks now and still won't take it. He'll chew on it if i hold it for him (teething)

Also, having really worked on naps to get better daytime sleep, they have gone to pot this week. Literally 15 minutes yesterday between getting p at 8 and 4.30pm. Although he wasn't upset or grizzly. Today, two lots of maybe 15minutes. And night waking have gone from one at 3.30am followed by cluster feeding (cosleep) to several.

Posted too soon.

Today we had total hysteria before sleep. The car, sling, feed to sleep thing didn't work for ages. Usually its a matter of seconds/minutes.

How do i get him to sleep? Nothing that worked only days ago has worked yesterday or today.

Hiya

Some babies just take a dummy without issue (my DC2 and 3 did from newborn, DC1 from 20 weeks when I first 'caved' and offered one). Others don't. DC4 was my first who I had to 'work at' to get her to take it. Maybe directly related, she was also a bottle refuser and cracking the bottle happened within the same couple of days of cracking the dummy.

Bit of a chicken and egg situation. DD clearly didn't understand how to gain comfort from anything that wasn't a nipple. She accepted the bottle first and that probably contributed to understanding that comfort can also come from sucking a dummy.

We started offering the dummy daily, at every opportunity from about 3 weeks old and she took it at 7 weeks old. I also worked on giving her 1 bottle of expressed BM each day, as a means to teach her to use a bottle.

Is your DS bottle or breastfed? Because the tactics used will be different.

I used to try to pretend the dummy (and bottle teat) were the nipple.

• Would position baby in breastfeeding position to give it dummy
• Feed until dozing (bearing in mind this was a newborn) and then whip nipple out of mouth and dummy in (I tried doing the same thing with a bottle of expressed milk too - but it never worked). If crying started then back to breast and repeat.
• Hold dummy (gently) in the mouth while rocking/bouncing to sleep
• Giving only when baby is very nearly asleep and calm

One of the most important things with the dummy being a source of comfort is that it should not be given instead of a feed. If baby is in any way hungry then dummy will rarely be enough no matter what you try.

You can tell when baby 'gets' what to do with a dummy because they start sucking it. Until then DD would have it in her mouth, but it would just sit there in her open mouth. It takes time for some babies to realise that if they suck, it feels soothing. Unfortunately you can't 'make' baby suck. Just offer lots of opportunities to practice until trial and error means they suck by accident and quite suddenly it 'clicks'.