For those with good sleepers

[Itsmeitscathyivecomehome]

Is there anything you did that you would recommend?

I have a two week old and my eldest didn’t sleep through the night til 9 months old.

id be interested to hear what people did that they felt impacted their babes sleep positively.

I know obviously all babes are different and will sleep in their own time but just want to canvass ideas.

my mum keeps telling me I slept through the night at 6 weeks and it’s making me feel crazy.

Dd slept through from 6 weeks BUT that was 12-6.
I got a straight 6 hours hours sleep.
If I'd put her to bed at 7pm, of course she'd wake up several times.
It's basic logic.

Putting them to bed at 7pm or earlier, then wondering why they don't: "sleep through", is so obviously stupid

3rd one here. DS slept through ( 7-5) at 12 weeks, DD was dream fed and would go 11-5:by 8 weeks and 7-6 by 6 months. They are 16 &19 now, we never had tears or trouble at bedtime.

All of mine were good sleepers.

Hail, rain or shine I had them out twice a day for a walk.

I read somewhere (years ago now) that fresh air really helps.

They also had a strong rthym to their day.

I credit some of my PND to trying to put DD in a routine to help her sleep. (Also did fresh air, same awake time each day, blah blah blah.) Good sleepers sleep well with routines but are good sleepers so they can be trained into the routines. Bad sleepers are bastard mavericks who scream in the face of cues, scream in the face of drowsy but awake (they just do very awake, or forced to sleep by feeding/rocking/anything that fucking works), and randomly stay awake without screaming through all your carefully planned naps.

Dd sleeps 10-12 hits a night since weeks 10. Bath each night, change into pjs and last feed in our bedroom. Put down awake with lights off and womb sounds. This routine wasn't established until 8 weeks because we were dealing with horrendous colic. We crept bedtime forward from midnight to 8pm slowly. DD rarely fell asleep on the boob and rocking and swaying used to stimulate her, and she was always happy to be out down awake, in the beginning we had to swaddle her arms in her gro bag and put our hands on her chest and shush her to sleep. But after a while we eliminated the hand and kept with the shushing and then it wasn't long until she would just close her eyes instantly without shushing. We then slowly moved one arm out of the bag around 3 months and then the second one came out a week or so later.

This.

My first was a nightmare. To the point that I was hallucinating due to sleep deprivation about the baby accidentally falling out of the window and called my mum to come and stay because I didn't feel safe alone with the baby.

My second just gives me a little smile and drifts off to sleep. It's completely bizarre.

I co slept and breastfed when they woke. It's biologically normal (and therefore "good") for infants to wake through the night, and helps protect them from SIDS. I got loads of sleep, as did they.

I honestly wonder if it's just the baby. Mine was great until a 8 month sleep regression, then I did sleep training and he nailed it and was sleeping through it a couple of weeks. I would swear by a proper routine (I found out from my sleep consultant about over/under tired and that they need the right amount of naps during the day to get a proper night sleep) and sleep training.
In saying that, many of the mums/babies in my antenatal group also used sleep training and most of their kids slept through too. I swear by it.
You have to wait until the baby is 6 months though.

I would ignore your mum its likely she was encouraged to use a cry it out method from day one, which is no longer recommended at that age. All babies wake its their natural safety mechanism.

I'll also be honest when I saw your first slept through from 9 months I rolled my eyes they don't sound like a bad sleeper at all... but that's why you don't compare babies.

Most important thing is preventing over tiredness. Sleep breeds sleep. Follow wake windows. Prioritise naps and that will help night time sleep. Difficult if you have older children and have to work around their schedule but try and get as many naps in the cot as possible. Start early, teach them the cot is where they sleep. Of course if you hold them all the time they will prefer that and then you have an 8 month old who won’t nap in their cot. Obviously.

white noise, firm hand on the tummy whilst the protest/ squirm at being put down and don’t pick them back up immediately. Sometimes I used to have to stand their with my hand on their tummy for 5-10 mins of protesting, but they did then drift off. I even slept with one arm off the bed, hanging in the Moses basket on ds tummy as he really didn’t want to be put down. Perseverance. Getting children to sleep doesn’t happen automatically, you need to work at it for months. They need to go to bed by 7-8pm once they are a couple of months old. Then dream feed - wake at 10/11pm to feed, as they will then do their long stretch after midnight.

both mine completely different personalities, both EBF, had reflux/ CMPA and both slept thru from 12 weeks.

I agree, with my first I tried huckleberry sleep ap, white and pink noise, pushing him around the garden in his pram rocking shushing, a next to me crib, gradual retreat. None of it worked, he would only fall asleep if fed to sleep. I had a horrendous time sleep training him at 9 months and 12 months with timed intervals of checking in on him which lasted weeks. From 12 months until about 2 years old he slept from 8pm until 7am without waking 50% of the time. The rest of the time he woke up once or twice which I was happy with.

My second child drops off to sleep in his car seat, playing with his toys, in the pram. I can shssh him to sleep, rock him in his crib, hold his hand and it all sooths him to sleep (but he does wake after ever 2-4 hours) so I agree temperament has a lot to do with it!

I don't think there's really much you can do. They are either good sleepers or they are not. It's their genetic make up

Honestly? Nothing. It was entirely luck in having a baby who was easy to get to sleep, could be put into her Moses basket or cot drowsy and fall asleep, and after the first couple of months started sleeping longer stretches at night. I FF instead of BF but don’t think that made a difference - it was just her personality. I was well aware that it was not usual and that most babies still woke up during the night for the first year.

I couldn’t have a second child, sadly, but occasionally wonder if a second baby would have been the same or a more typical baby who didn’t sleep as well.

snugglemonkey agree with the feeding but why sad?
We were all sleeping well. Regularly. Happy memories of their childhood. Nothing more sad than feeling 'broken' or 'on your knees' with exhaustion. No marital conflict over who was most tired.
Plenty of time in the day for cuddles and milky snuggles but at night I needed that physical and psychological space.

Of course if you hold them all the time they will prefer that and then you have an 8 month old who won’t nap in their cot. Obviously.
Eh, depends on the baby. I held DD all the time (in part cos it’s really nice holding a baby, plus then you get to be the one stuck on the sofa with a book and a cup of tea, while DP loads the dishwasher) til she was eight months, which funnily enough was when she got too big for it to be comfortable for her, and at nap time would start struggling to be put down/wake because she didn’t have enough room. One day we happened to be in the bedroom for a nap and she reached for her sleeping bag and crawled to the cot. Boom, she was now a cot napper (and we were then stuck at home til she stopped napping – she never did take to the pram).

It's been a long time (14 years!) but we used to do a bedtime routine with DS2 from a few weeks old, to match his 5 year old brothers. Sounds a bit bizarre, he "listened" to the bedtime story, had a bath, bottle then into his cot. He's forever been a creature of routine, and I'm sure this was the start of it

I think this does make a difference. I do bedtime alone for my two, which means the baby gets the same bedtime routine as the older one (bath, story, then lying in bed being fed in a dark room while the older one drifts off to sleep).

I also agree - like lots of traits with children you get what you're given and you just work with it. I've tried lots of things with my son and had intervention from an NHS sleep person (can't remember what the actual title was) and none of it worked all just caused frustration and upset. Someone advised me best thing you can do is focus on getting 'enough' sleep whilst that might not be an unbroken sleep or might mean going to bed earlier than you would normally like to unfortunately that's the compromise of having a child...

My son wakes twice a night for about 10mins a time and that's fine by me obviously I still want it to improve but we're happier going with the flow rather than forcefully pushing something he clearly doesn't want and being up 4+ times a night for longer periods (that was our previous reality).

As others have said, it completely depends on the baby and your specific set of circumstances.

Some of these bits of advice might work, but unfortunately there is no magic wand to tell you which ones so it is a bit like trial and error!

I was super keen to be a ‘go with the flow’ Mum as I’m not very routine orientated. However it turned out that my DD wouldn’t just go to sleep anywhere when she was tired, so unless I helped her she just wouldn’t nap. And then she would be unhappy and cranky. So we turned to wake windows and pram naps/routines/white noise etc. And it worked brilliantly for her - she sleeps in 6:30pm - 6:30am now at 18 months with no more needed than the bath/story bed routine that she has always had.

However if she had been happy with the ‘go with the flow’ approach we probably would have stuck with that and not done much else and told everyone that that’s what we did and it worked.

My nephew would sleep absolutely anywhere - the high chair, the playmat anywhere you put him. So SIL and BIL never had to get him into any routine or try and sleep training because it worked great for them.

TLDR: It might not work because all babies are different but wake windows, a bedtime routine and good old white noise worked great for us.

Our bedtime routine (when we went to bed, around 11) bottle, change, cuddle. Into her next to me and I used to do the bedtime speech. How beautiful she was, lovely dreams, we can play again in the morning and we held hands until I fell sleep. We would feed and change again around 3/4am as quiet as possible, little cuddle, back to bed and hold hands again. Apart from illness and one blip for about 2 weeks she's slept through. She's now 2 and she sleeps from 7.30/8 until 8/8.30