... if there is such a thing!!
Hi Everyone,
If anyone can shed any light or give any advice, i'd be so so grateful.
My little one is 5 months old and is EBF and we use dummies for nap/ bed comfort.
Until about 7 weeks ago, was waking once a night for a feed and would then settle and go back to sleep.
Fast forward and she is now waking approx. 4 times a night. When she wakes i feed her back to sleep. She sometimes stays on the boob for a short amount of time and doesn't appear to have a full feed though, which makes me think some of this is about comfort, not hunger?
I've done some reading and keep coming across the term 'sleep association' and all of the articles i read say that baby needs to learn to self settle. Is this possible at this age? Or is it too early to try to teach her? How do you teach a baby to do this?! I've started to introduce a comforter blanket into our feeds, so maybe she'll get used to snuggling that instead of my boob? And i read something else about playing continuous white noise overnight (posted previously about a machine, thanks for the suggestions!). She feeds well during the day and is gaining weight well.
I've read you should put baby to bed drowsy but awake, but she gets so upset if i try this and gets too worked up to sleep at all.
The other evening we did our usual routine at bed time and she fell asleep on my boob (this is our usual- is this the problem?), i then slide my nipple out and a dummy in (or this?) and put her in the next to me cot and she slept for her 2 hours and woke, her Dad went up to settle her and she became frantic after about 5 minutes, so i ended up feeding and cuddling her to sleep again.
How is she ever going to sleep in her own room like this??
If i got a bit more sleep too, that'd be a bonus, although i think i've adjusted to the amount of sleep i'm getting now and don't feel too bad.
Sorry this is long and waffly, i suppose i just want to know if this is "normal" if so, that's ok, if not and i'm teaching her that to sleep she needs me, how do i go about fixing things?
I feel like a bit of a failure, all the other Mums from my NCT have babies who sleep 12 straight hours in their own rooms 😏 My Mum just says 'this is what babies do' and none of my other friends have babies yet.