Misguided Illusion Part II - Baby still not sleeping through by six months? Come and join us!

[MomOrMum]

Thought I would start a fresh thread as, sadly, we have almost filled the first one.

Feral, Kiwi, Chulita, et al...shouldn't we have graduated from this thread by now?!

Now welcoming a new crop of 6 months+ babies determined to help us reach new heights/depths of sleep deprivation.

Here is the original thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/sleep/713951-Support-thread-for-those-who-were-under-the-misguided-illusion

I would like to graduate soon please .

Btw, has anybody else noticed that there seems to be a bit of an overlap between the people on this thread, the still BFing thread and the BLW thread? I haven't counted scientifically or anything, as I'm too tired for that . But it made me wonder about cause and effect. I think that I am still BFing and opting for BLW as DS sleeps so badly that I think those are the easiest ways for me to get through the days and nights. What do you think?

I'm a newbie! My DS is nearly 7 months and still not sleeping through. We had a rotten week of hourly waking- not hungry or anything just awake! Anyhow last night was better and we can now put it down to his new crawling skills and tooth no 2!
Any top tips or caffeine rich tea and sympathy welcome!

Ps. We are FF and find the nght time milk helps a bit.

Ooh, shiny new thread. Hmm, doesn't really make up for the lack of sleep though does it?

IsItMeOr - I'm on the BLW and still BF threads too. You are welcome to use my body for your scientific experiment (but only if you knock me out so I can get some sleep).

I'm another one who's been too tired and miserable to post for a while, but... I think we are finally seeing some progress. We have gone from a low point this week of 2.5 hours of hysterical screaming at 2am (how does he keep going for soooo long, how?) to 1 brief waking at 3am, with some patting and less than 1 minute of crying!

We are still shhh-patting and then leaving him to cry for 1 min, then 2, etc up to a max of 5. He's put up an impressive fight and nearly broken me (I was dressed and ready to go for a walk at 4am the other night as I just couldn't stand it anymore).

After speaking to a pharmacist and lady in health food shop, we are also giving him Rescue Remedy Night stuff and weak chamomile tea in his beaker at tea time and I am main-lining the stuff (I hate it). A quick google says this is ok but if anyone knows any different, please tell me!

Fingers crossed for tonight everyone. Keep the faith!

MoM good plan on the new thread
Yay for sospan, sounds very similar to DD at the mo. When she does wake she usually has about a minute of crying once I've shushed her. Monday night we had a lot of crying but the last two nights she's slept from 5:30pm til 6:30am without a peep...yes, that's right, 13 hour sleeps! There is actually no emoticon good enough to express that level of ness! Now I'm off to light some candles to ward off the jinx I just put on us

13 hours???????

Chulita What on earth have you been doing to her?

Okay ladies, DH is having the week after next off so that we can try to help DS sleep better (he broke us very easily when we tried to do it with DH at work).

Our plan is to try and reduce the night feeds (and thus hopefully reduce night wakings). Seems there are three ways to do this - stretch the gaps, reduce the time allowed to feed or have a no-feed time window.

Have we missed any options, and do you guys have any positive/negative experiences to help us decide which one to try?

Many thanks!

I've been watching the other thread for ages, hoping that somewhere there would be a little trick to get DD (7mths, BF, 3 meals a day) to sleep through. At the moment it can be every 2/1.5 hours waking up crying. A BF is the only thing that calms her down. I'm sure there must be another way...I can't imagine even having 4 hours unbroken sleep at the moment, never mind 13.
I feel like I must be doing something really obviously wrong.

Oh jurassic, the thinking there must be something really obvious that we're doing wrong thing is a killer, isn't it?

Sounds like your dd is having a really bad phase (does it help to think of them as phases?). The only sure fire thing I have found is that as time passes, so do the phases eventually, although I'm hoping we're coming to the end of the current 3-month long phase of something different pretty much every night, and none of them involving more than 4 hours unbroken sleep for us, and most closer to 2 hours... DH and I are pretty much done in now.

You will have heard it before, but does your DH help with the settling? DH has always done this, and it does mean that I've rarely had to feed DS more than 3 times in a night. It is hard on DH when there are 8 wakes though, and if DS doesn't resettle quickly, I tend to do the odd turn as well just for DH's sanity.

I can't break the pattern - BF/BLW, I even co-slept until she was 6 months (then moved her into her own room because she was sleeping great and I wasn't at all. now she won't settle with me, wants her own bed )

If there's an easiest option I'm all for it.

DD is 10 months. Our previous holding pattern of 9pm bedtime / 2am feed / 6am feed / 8am waking has been completely stuffed as DD has been sick the last couple of weeks. She even let me cuddle her early this morning (after squealing and rolling around for nearly three hours)!

Now it's all crying and refusing to sleep.

I'm getting all aspirational about sleeping through the night now - like watching lovely DIY shows on television. I secretly know I can't, but like to think that with just a few tips that could be me snuggled under the covers for ten hours.

Hi marenmj - our ds never co-slept but used to spend most of his naps BFing for the first 3 months (I didn't realise at the time ). Now he doesn't really seem interested in lying down feeding, which used to be a good way of getting him to have a nap so that we both could. So I think we both have dcs who like their own space .

Loving that aspirational DIY show analogy. I've been looking at the mega-expensive quilts and cosy pyjamas in the White Company catalogue. I suspect it may be the same phenomenon!

Hi! Can I join you? DS is 6.5 months old and is waking 5 plus times a night (YAWN!!). I'm starting to feel dizzy every day and last night was particularly awful. He was determined to have 5 feeds and then woke up for an hour and a half at 3am and refused to go back to sleep.....grrrr

He also won't stay in his cot for more than an hour or two. Everyone (including my Mum) is telling me to stop feeding him and let him cry it out but I live in a flat with very sensitive neighbours (and I don't agree with letting 6 month old babies scream their heads off for hours on end). So he's sleeping next to me and keeping me awake by kicking me and pushing me to the endge until I'm clinging on to the mattress with the muscles in my bum-cheeks!!

P.S I have to go back to work in 2 months!! Aaarrgghhhhh!

Hi girls, just saw this in Active Convos and thought I'd pop on to give you a bit of hope. I was an early contributor to the original thread and did plenty of hair-tearing over my DS's total inability to nap or sleep for any decent length of time. He is now nearly 14mo and sleeps through the night pretty much all the time, plus takes long, luxurious daytime naps. I NEVER thought this would happen (but I'm glad it has). So take heart!

jurassic - DD is 11mths and has only just started sleeping through every now and then. Up until 9.5mths we were on 1.5/2hr wakings and feeding through the night, I started being more ruthless once she was 10mths because I was losing the plot with 10mths sleep deprivation. She did used to do the odd 4hr stretch but not longer than that. You're not doing anything wrong, we're all different!
IsItMeOr - I started by offering one boob at the 10pm and 3am feeds, the midnight one she still got both and then dropped boob altogether on the 10 and 3 and eventually dropped the midnight feed. There was a lot of crying involved but I had to break the comfort feed habit and of course if she's not being comforted she'll cry
Welcome Kalikaroo !

Thanks chulita - interestingly ds has started dropping to one boob himself pretty consistently for feeds both day and night, other than the bedtime one. This just in the last week or so.

While this gives me hope for the "perhaps it will all sort itself out if we do nothing" train of thought, we need things to move along now for our sanity. You did well to stick it out for 10 months , it is a killer.

Hm, DD has only in the last couple of weeks started taking both boobs in a feed. From the moment she was born is has been one boob per meal for her. I could never interest her in taking both until she was very ill and went off solids almost completely.

Now she has decided she likes both boobs in a feed and will be angry if I try to only let her have one

Hey marenmj - that's only the last couple of weeks that DD has been ill isn't it? I should think at 10mo she'll be hungry and thirsty if she's off solids, so I wouldn't be surprised if she settles down to her old one boob routine when she's eating solids again.

Yes. She managed to pick up a viral rash AND a bad cough in the same week. Just as she was rounding the corner from the cough, I managed to cook a dodgy meal and gave everyone in the house minor food poisoning

The cough is gone and so is the rash, she's back on solid food again, but has kept the BF schedule from when she was sick.

I figure when she is back to 100% she will probably revert back to one at a time, but in the meantime my body is working double and I'm feeling rough for it!

marenmj poor you! I think you're right. If DS has anything unsettle him, there seems to be a few days after everything is well again before he goes back to his usual routines. Case in point is that he has lost his trusty left thumb, which used to be the go-to thumb for all his daytime napping needs. Thumb has been MIA for weeks now. I miss it .

Another one nap day here, as I couldn't get him to go to or stay asleep when I put him in his cot this afternoon. I need to work out how I can get less tense about this, as it really doesn't matter that much and I'm making myself miserable over it, which is daft.

What happened to his thumb? That sounds awful, for both of you! I'm really glad DD will take a dummy.

We're down to one nap per day too.

Hellooo! Yet another sleep thread for me to be a part of!

DS and I had a bit of a falling out this morning as it's the fifth day in a row that he's woken up before 5am and There is no apparent reason for it. I decided this morning that I was just going to go straight in and BF him back to sleep and even that didn't work.

I'm on half term at the mo but I'm back to school on Monday when this is really going to be unacceptable as I won't be able to have a lovely 2 hour nap in the morning to make up for it (tends not to go down too well when you're a teacher with a room full of teenagers!)

What really pisses me off is that a few months ago I would have killed for 6 straight hours kip but now this stupid early waking is really wearing me down.

Tonight we're reinstating the dreamfeed but DH is doing it with formula. I've got some of that growing up milk which is practically porridge it's so thick. If that doesn't work then I'm going to try the wake-to-sleep tactic but that is a truly last resort as I'll have to be really desperate to actually set my alarm for 4am!

Hey all. Have been too darn weary to post. I can tell you exactly the last decent nights sleep I got - that was my birthday present from DD. She slept 7pm to 6am straight, had feed, went back to sleep tilll 7.30. That was the start of the month and I haven't had a good night since

She's just been waking loads - 5 times last night - and now the only way to get her to sleep is to BF her. I don't even need to BF her to sleep, just enough to calm her, pop her back in cot, she rolls over and snoozes. But if we try anything else it's just megameltdownorama time. She just stands up, holds onto cot bars, screams. Repeat ad infinitum.

Anyone know where I can buy a baby in-cot straightjacket?

Note: I am not entirely sure if this is a joke

IsItMeOr last night I got 3.5 hours at the beginning of the night, thanks to DH just telling DD that we were in the house (as much as he is willing to help, he never wakes during the night though)The rest of the night was round about 1.5 hours but then one stretch of 2.5hrs. I'm sure her being in our room still is walking her up (dam squeaky Ikea bed!) but allocated room is still DH's office at moment. Has anyone found that it is related to development or just that we've set up bad habits?
Chulita 10 months was what I was thinking for lasting it out before trying any system. Still hoping that it will all pass. It doesn't really affect me too much at the moment as I'm only back to work one day a week but I almost feel embarrassed to tell anyone about it.

Wow, just googled wake-to-sleep and it sounds pretty rough.

My DD used to take 20-30 minute naps and no longer. It was making me insane. So I decided when she was napping that I would just keep putting her back to sleep until she woke up happy (ie, if she woke up crying I would feed or rock or swing her [sleeping in a hammock in our room at the time] until she went back to sleep).

The first couple of days were difficult, not so much in that she cried a lot, but that it took a lot of time and effort to get her back to sleep - time that I normally would have spent just trying to get a few things done.

It paid off after a day or two though and she started taking 1-2 hour naps instead of a million tiny naps.

I guess that's kind of like wake-to-sleep, except I didn't try to anticipate it and I didn't bother at night - just during daytime naps.

Of course, that may not work for you. I'm making it ALL up as I go along...

FG, how old is your DS? The info I saw about wake-to-sleep said it didn't really work on babies over 6 months.

Hi all, DD been frightful since last post and this weekend DH is away and of course DD tonight has surpassed herself with waking up at least once every hour. Have ended up with her in my bed. Today she decided that that 3am was a great to be fully awake, has taken me til now to get her back off, mixture if feeding, cuddles and then some teething powers ( she is teething BAD). Am exhaused so am gonna try sleep now while she is. Thinking of you all :-/