Babies who sleep well :)

[heron22]

Both my DS are good sleepers. I really feel sorry for mums of babies who dont.

I would like to hear from mums whose babies sleep well. What did you do or not do?

Lets share our stories!

iggly just wondering, do you keep the nursery room dark when you are settling your LO? as dark as possible? i find that i need to do that and that is my LO's biggest cue that this is now bedtime.

heron no we haven't but have tried last two nights and it helps. However DS has been diagnosed with reflux which explains alot! So we've got meds for that and hopefully he'll be easier to settle now....

Oh i am sorry to hear about the reflux. my LO had it too. he is now nearly a year old and is fine now. he was on med plus gaviscon in his bottle. i wanted him to get breast milk so i expressed every 3 hours. phew am glad that was over!

Touching all sorts of wood when i type this

I have an amazing sleeper too. Has always been like it since being born, we had to wake her in hospital for feeds during the night. From 13 weeks, she went 7 - 8.30/9am.

The only thing I did was always stick to a bedtime routine, she could do what she liked in the day sleep/feedwise, but at 7 she was always tucked up in bed. I also think, as she wasnt cuddly baby, that helped. She never wanted cuddling to sleep, and used to push me to get down when she wanted to drift off. She was also very alert during the day, and wanted constant and very tiring stimulation , so i think its the type of baby she is. Dreading what the next one will bring, my brother didnt sleep through til he was 11.

It is tough heron! I have no idea when he'll outgrow it but we've just started on the gaviscon so hopefully that will make his life easier! Once we settle him he does sleep through the night - it's just getting him settled in the first place

11? Oh my god your poor parents mrswill. I'm on week 7 of broken sleep and it is killing me! DS3 is pretty good at night but being the age he is still needs night feeding twice a night (slowly moving towards morning now though). I'm so KNACKERED. But he goes down brilliantly at 8.30pm as we've also kept to a bedtime routine from early on and I swear it works! There may be babies who don't go down 'for the night' after a bedtime routine from early on but all three of mine have.

We've got a good sleeper too but were a Gina Ford house from about 8 weeks, slowly guiding him into it from that point. That helped an enormous amount and is the reason we didn't end up killing him/ourselves!

I got fantastic sleepers. I fed on demand and co-slept. Oh, they woke, and sometimes I did, but we were all quick to settle and get back to it. We'd sometimes spend a good 12 hours in bed to make sure we all got the sleep we needed, and we did.

Never had one second of being sleep-deprived with dd. Wish I had the knowledge with no.1 that I did with no.2, to understand that the easiest path for all is to go with the flow and not base my perception of successful parenting on the no. of hours my baby slept, or to become obsessed by the clock.

Wish I knew before I had children that routines in small babies are extrememly hardwork, unpleasant and unnecessary.

cfc we're a ginaford house too. and without our routine i dont think we will get any sleep! i cant remember how many weeks my babies were before routine were in place. but definitely by 12 weeks the routines were in place.

i cannot imagine babies waking up every hour or feeding every hour!

Both my sons were GFord babies in her routines from 2 weeks, and slept 7pm-7am from then on. Absolutely brilliant and worked straight away for both.

I was as strict with daytime naps as I was with bedtime routine and even in lighter bedrooms during the day I would only have to zip up a grobag and say "have a nap now baby" and leave the room and they would be asleep in minutes.

I have never taken them from their dark rooms after 7pm and they have never come out of them now they are children and not babies.

I can't recommend this night-light enough. Don't use the autofade feature, but use it on lowest setting and sometimes brighter if you need to administer medicine or something. Can't imagine life without them, they are in both son's rooms.

I may sound like a right strict old dragon, but honestly think my kids are happier and healthier having good quality sleep and knowing their boundaries now that they are older, although I am aware that GF isn't right for every family's lifestyle.

I am not sure if DD is a good sleeper or not, she is 12 weeks and goes to bed at 9 pm, we will try to move this forward, BUT, wakes up at 2 am although she sttles with dummy straight away, then at 4.30 am she gets her night feed, she might wake up again at 6 or so but settles with dummy and she was sleep today until 10 am! If she sleeps until 10 tomorrow will try to bring forward a bit the bedtime.

Now, she didn't do this until we stopped giving her the bath before bed as she would get really excited and it woke her up. Only yesterday she looked relaxed after her bath

Also she has big animal colorful stickers in her bedroom wall, so she won't stop looking at them until I switch the light off, then she can't see them so she goes to sleep, when we go to check on her (or just to stare and smile ) we use the corridor light.