Decided to go cold turkey on the night feeds last Friday. He's 10mo, wasn't eating much in the way of solids during the day and was making up for it at night. This was fine for us until recently. I decided it was time to take a bit more control and encourage him to eat more during the day so when I go back to work full-time (next month) he won't be keeping me up at night.
Bit of background:
We already had a good bedtime routine, but since about 8mo DS has been pulling himself up in his cot so we've had to rock/feed to sleep in order to put him down.
Whenever he woke, DH would go in and pick him up resettle him and put him down asleep. If he was crying for more than 20 mins I would go in and feed to sleep and put back in his cot. I started working part-time around the same time (8mo) and whenever it got to about 3/4am DS wouldn't go back in his cot so easily (waking after being fed-to-sleep, then pulling himself up) so I would bring him into our bed in order to get him back to sleep quickly. This was fine for us at the time.
Over the last month he has started waking more frequently (during and post teething), and also refusing to go back into his cot earlier in the night so we are co-sleeping for larger portion of the night.
So last week we decided it would be a good time to do something about it. We'll have a month to crack it before I go to work full-time. I decided that with all our sleep props - feeding/rocking/co-sleeping/bringing downstairs to play music/walk round the house - that CC (as advised by a paediatric nurse who came to visit us) would be too much of a shock and that I should at first tackle dropping the night feeds. To try and help we've stopped him napping after 4pm (except today, where he's fallen asleep on the boob, am limiting it to 30 mins though), ensure he gets a big carby meal for dinner and is breastfed before and after his bath.
Friday was relatively easy. DH resettled DS for most of the night until about 4am when he brought him to me for a feed. We then co-slept till 7am.
Saturday was worse, he woke hourly and was up between 1 and 3:30, either crying, playing or dozing on our shoulder but waking as soon as we put him in his cot.
Sunday no better. Still waking hourly, but we decided no more leaving his bedroom as it only woke him up further from then on. That cut the playing out - but the crying/shoulder dozing continued.
Monday and Tuesday, more frequent wakings and crying for longer. In some form or another we've ended up co-sleeping with him. Either on the spare bed in his room, or dragging the mattress onto the floor next to his cot (didn't help get him into his cot either).
Have we been expecting too much from DS, dropping the night feeds and expecting him to resettle in his room? I didn't want to replace night feeds with co-sleeping (doesn't work anyway, he just crawls all over me till I sit up and feed him).
Should we persevere and continue as we are...which is becoming increasingly difficult as we are suffering cumulative sleep deprivation. Or should we take it up a notch and start CC?