Lucy Wolfe - stay and support

[heartandheart]

My DS is about to turn 6 months and we've decided that we're going to try Lucy Wolfe stay and support as we are not coping with the night wakings... as I'm writing this we are on our 9th wake up of the night and it is only 3.30am!
He doesn't feed to sleep except during the night and he used to be able to self settle for naps and at the start of the night but never in the night (including half an hour after he's been put down!) he's lost this though since we moved him into his own room.

Anyway, my question is... how will I know if he's genuinely hungry in the night? At 6 months is there w possibility he might actually wake due to hunger?
I don't want to confuse him so that he can be fed sometimes and not others but I also don't want to feed him unnecessarily because how things are right now is not good for any of us.

Anyone who has used stay and support, I would love any feedback?

We've decided this is the way forward for us and have decided to use a gentler approach after reading a lot so I'm not looking for opinions on sleep training as I've read them all before.

Thanks!

Hi OP.
I haven't used that.
But at almist 6 months milk is your baby's main and only source of nutrition.
When babies wake during the night they wake for food and comfort. They haven't learnt to self soothe yet.
It's really important to give them that reassurance and provide them with the nutrition they require.
There is absolutely no way of telling if your baby is waking for food or nutrition.
I strongly advise against not feeding your baby during the night at such a young age.
My baby (almost not a baby) is 1 and a half and still wakes during the night for feeds.
It's biologically normal.

Thanks for your input. He's waking up upset multiple times a night and definitely not hungry as sometimes it is after 10 minutes/ 15 minutes/ half and hour and an hour. But I do acknowledge that he may well be hungry at some point in the night.

Would love to know if someone has used Lucy Wolfe at this age? She does talk about keeping 1/2 feeds but I just worry this will be confusing for him. I read the book a while ago to be fair so will need to reread before we try anything.

Not sure about what book says but I had a hourly wake up baby.

For me, feed wise was like day time.

So let's say she was meant to take 30 ounce, give or take. If she took six ounce feeds I knew how much she had taken in day and frequency. So if in day she would take a feed every four hours I would offer one every four hours of night wakes.

I could obviously only work it like that when I stopped BF and she was on formula.

She also had a different hungry cry, not always easy to identify mind. Finally I did a little baby sign, one of which was milk so she grasped that very quick and would always ask for milk when hungry.

If little one almost six months you may be about to schedule milk and food more if offering food now as well so you might find it easier to offer a pattern with the milk.

@moobar yeah... he has a hungry cry but in the night I think he's always waking and is upset that he's awake. He just wants to be able to stay asleep, poor thing!
I don't think he's ever getting hungry in the night as I always feed him before I actually gets hungry!
I'm combined feeding now so my partner can help a little but like you say it does make it difficult to know what he's getting. He can go 4 hours in the day so maybe 4 hours would be a good time to aim for in the night... say he goes to bed at 7 and we feed if he wakes around 1 and 5ish...
hopefully if he learns to soothe himself and get himself through those sleep cycles, if he wakes we'll know it genuinely is for hunger! I don't know if I'm being too optimistic here though!
When I put him to bed on a night, I stay with him and just keep my hand on his chest/ hold his hand and he just falls to sleep. He always wakes up half an hour later though and he's more difficult to settle then. I just feel he really struggles with getting through to that next sleep cycle!

Just realised my maths is all wrong but you get the gist! Haha

My DS is 7 months and ebf. He wakes every hour and i really need to change that before I go back to work. I know most of the time he’s waking for comfort and he’ll only go back if I put him on breast, otherwise he just cries. Last night I slept in the spare room so I could get a solid few hours.

He went down at 7, woke at 8.45 and DH took 10-15 mins to settle him. He woke again at 10.45 and took 5 mins to settle. He then woke again at midnight and I fed him.

I’m working on he can go 4 hours between feeds

@Giraffe88 it's so hard isn't it! That's what I think we're going to have to do... go on 4 hours...
At the minute were soothing/ rocking for up to 2 hours and then feeding.
He was up and down constantly last night but then slept 4am-7.30am! He'd only manage a couple of whole hours before that and most were half an hour or less!
He also is such an effort to get to nap too so i feel like he's constantly overtired - despite my best efforts.

I used Lucy Wolfe starting around the same age and I just worked on not feeding until 2am (I knew mine could go 5 hours as she had several times before) and using her method for any wakings previous. Usually ended up feeding at later wakes too as too tired to be doing more long resettles are 4am. It actually worked really well and the feed wake has been getting later so any feeds after that have been fewer too!

@Melamine ah that's great to hear! Thanks l! We've started making little changes and he has responded well but we're away next week so thought there's no point in starting properly until we can be consistent with it.

We started just by resettling without milk if it had been less than two hours since last feed. Then three. Then she just lengthened the time asleep herself so she was only waking up once.

I don’t have the book. Can anyone please advise what the method is? Just resettle without milk? I don’t want to do any leaving to cry or not picking up to settle

@Giraffe88 it's called stay and support... so you sit by the bed and soothe with whatever method your baby prefers... stroking, shushing, patting. She says you can pick baby up if he/she gets upset but not to rock to sleep and depending on baby this may make baby so upset.
There's also a daytime routine that kind of works in conjunction with it depending on babies age. We need this too as my DS nap's are very intermittent and hard to land!
We did stay and support last night and when he got upset we picked up until he calmed down and put him back down and then he just whinged a little and today he's self settled for 2 naps even though they were still super short (just with me sat next to him) and self settled for bedtime! AND, and I know this may not seem like a big deal, he's been asleep 2 hours and 10 minutes so far! He normally ALWAYS wakes up 35 minutes after bedtime and needs resettling so this is some kind of miracle! Fingers crossed it's not a fluke!

I don't have this book, but I used a similar approach with my baby. I found that I could tell when she was trying to get back to sleep - wriggling to get comfortable, covering her eyes, no eye contact, grisling - versus hungry - looking straight at me, more likely to properly cry within a few mins. Hopefully you'll see similar cues?

She now does 0-1 feeds at night, so it does get there!

@singingatmidnight that’s interesting as my DS does those things when trying to get back to sleep. If I try just patting him though it frustrates him more so I have to pick him up.

@heartandheart my DS gets frustrated and cries more if I don’t pick him up. Can you just pick up and cuddle according to the booK?

I decided I’m not feeding him before 11 so any wake ups before that I’ll rock him in the hope it will make him not bother waking as he’s not getting food. Last night He woke at 8.30 and it took me 20 mins to rock him back to sleep. He then slept until 12, had a feed then slept again until 3 so he did two 3 hour sleeps!!! Then was wide awake for 35 mins. Then woke every hour until 6.20 when we got up. I’m happy with that as a starter but it was probably a fluke!

I bought the gentle sleep book the other day so I don’t really want to buy this one too (good old smp!!!). Is there anything else about the book that would be beneficial? You can read a preview online which I’ve read up to chapter 4 but it looks like it’s 5&6 which I really need

Yes, mine doesn't like patting - shushing or a hand on the chest or a hand hold, but patting annoys her!

@Giraffe88 it's about completely reducing your input so baby falls asleep by then self so it doesn't allow cuddling/rocking baby to sleep as the theory is; when they wake, they'll still need you to do this.
One thing the book suggests if your baby is upset is distraction, bang on the mattress or the cot bars, turn the white noise machine up really loud and then back down again etc, blow gently on baby's face... this is meant to make them more receptive to whatever method you're using to soothe them although we've not tried it! I
We started by rocking until sleepy and putting down, he used to really cry when we did this and we'd have to rock him again but now he just grizzles and then goes to sleep! And that has kind of turned into him learning to get sleepy in his bed I think... last night we didn't pick up at all on the 2 non/feeds.

We did get to a point where he settled himself before but we went backwards when he moved into his own room.
We had 4 wake ups last night and 2 feeds! And the last wake up he went back to sleep with a hand on the chest within 5 minutes! We've really not had very much upset at all except about 5 minutes of crying on the first night so he's responded really well to it! Although we've only had 2 nights now so I know better than to get ahead of myself... although this is new territory! He's never EVER woke up so few times in a night! fingers crossed.

That’s what I’m trying to do, rock until sleepy but not fully asleep in the hope I can gradually reduce the amount of rocking. There’s no way I can just put him down and distract him, that definitely wouldn’t work 😂

That’s really good that it’s working so well. I hope it continues 🤞🏻

@heartandheart I just wondered how you’re doing with this?

@Giraffe88 honestly I am the biggest Lucy Wolfe fan in the whol s world. He is settling himself for every nap a d bedtime. Sometimes he still wants us to stay in the room with him which we don't mind doing at all but sometimes we leave him to it and he falls asleep. The last couple of nights he's just woke for a feed at around 2-3am which is totally fine by me also (such an improvement from 4 wake ups being a good night!) and that's been it since the morning! He's also started napping for longer than 35 minutes at a time.

It's not been consistently improving though... some days in between we've had 7/8 wake ups a night but we've consistant with not rocking him to sleep and every time he falls to sleep in his cot.

@heartandheart that’s amazing!!!! I really need to do something with my DS but I just don’t know what to do. Do you need to read the full book to get this method?

I would say it is probably more useful to read it yeah. There's lots of bits I refer back to every now and again to check and in the end chapter she says one of the main reasons it doesn't work is when people do a "pick and choose" of the different aspects of it.
I think we have been quite strict with it for the past 2 weeks at least but we've also been lucky that when he has got upset he's responded well to the stay and support and there haven't been too many times where he's got very upset. We are using a dummy too which I think has helped soothe him. I think for us it would have been a lot harder without the dummy.

@heartandheart did you use a dummy before starting this? My DS doesn’t have one

Yeah he did have one before. It's not needed! I just found it easier to soothe him with one although I'm already longing for the day he can put it in himself!