How can I get 4 month old to sleep without her dummy?

[lulupop]

Here is a record of my night last night:
11pm Went to sleep after last feed of DD (4 months)
12.30am DS (2 yrs 8 mos) woke up, bad dream, had to settle him back
1.40am DD woke for feed. Fed for 20 mins then spent another hour waking every time dummy fell out
2.40am DD finally asleep
3am DS woke up, wanted drink
4am Neighbours came home noisily and woke me up
5am DD woke for feed, came in bed with me (too exhausted to do otherwise by now)
6am DS woke up for the day

This is an average night for me. I am so exhausted I feel I'm losing my perspective on everything and starting to feel quite depressed. DS has always been a terrible sleeper - we made every mistake in the book with him and it's only now he sort of sleeps OK, after a lot of stress for us all. I swore blind I would never make the same mistakes with DD and yet here I am with another baby who won't go to sleep without a dummy.

She loves her dummy and I've ended up letting her have it as she goes to sleep, mainly as I;ve always been busy dealing with DS at the same time. Now she wants it every time she wakes, which means I'm out of bed 10 times a night.

I have tried just letting her suck it until she gets drowsy and then removing it, but she just cries as soon as she realises it's gone. Just typeing this msg has taken me 25 mins as I've put her for her nap and she keeps crying for me to go back and replace her dummy.

Should I just leave a 4 month old to cry herself to sleep? Nothing I do at her cot-side comforts her - in fact it seems to enrage her further. I don;t know what to do and I feel so depressed at the thought of going through what we;ve been through with DS all over again. Please help me.

I'm afraid we just got to the point of taking it away, after I found myself weeping hysterically with exhaustion and begging DP on the phone to come back and take the baby away and "give it to social services". One night of horrid wailing, one night of a bit of wailing, nothing after that. It honestly was her or me at that stage!

We went through this with ds. i just couldn't bring myself to go cold turkey though, so I put up with the getting up for about 2 weeks, then he got alot better. He still cries if he wakes properly, but alot of the time he doesn't know its gone now. If he does wake, I just shove it back in. This is only once, maybe twice a night, and its much better than all the not-going-back -to-sleep tantrums. Plus I'm usually up a few times in the night myself, so I never get a full nights sleep anyway, even if he does!

I'm sorry this might not help at all but when your baby can pick up her dummy, they do dummies that glow in the dark so she doesn't have to wake you up, she can find it herself. By the time she can pick it up you're probably hoping that she won't need a dummy though!!

At what age do they start to pick the dummy up themselves?

I'm with motherinferior on this, we just took it away at about 4months, started with daytime naps all done within a couple of days. And this was quite honestly the best thing we could of done!