Any advice for dealing with a 6 month old who wakes every hour crying for her dummy?

[memoo]

DD is 6 months. She has been sleeping from 7 til about 5 for the past few months with an 11pm dream feed.

We have always settled her with her dummy but it usually falls out after a while and she hasn't missed it.

This past week though she has started waking every hour crying for her dummy. As soon as we put it back in she goes straight back to sleep.

Anybody had this with their DC and what did you do? feels like we are getting no sleep!!

It may not be the dummy - DS does this periodically and I always find myself blaming the dummy and tell myself I will have to get rid of it - then shortly after he comes down with a cold, or starts digging around in his mouth because his teeth are bothering him (another reason he spits out the dummy). However once the cold or teething passes, he goes back to normal. As its only been a week I would wait a bit, unless you feel she really doesn't need the dummy anyway. Personally, my DS ONLY finds comfort with a dummy when ill or distressed, and will not be rocked, cuddled, pat, shush anything as this does not soothe him at all, so I let him keep the dummy. Just letting you know that it won't necessarily be the end of the wakings if you get rid of it.

Also I have the dummy clipped onto his sleepsuit with an Avent clip on a short strap, then the sleepingbag over the top. This means its very easy for him to find it when it falls out in the night, as otherwise it will fall onto the floor. HTH

We had this with a dummy but it was from early days when I introduced it (odd that it is starting now with you?) - I had to get rid of it but I second littlelentil because although dumping the dummy helped A LOT it did not stop him waking for comfort (a cuddle, me, a feed etc).

If you decide to keep the dummy you could start teaching your baby to put it in their mouth themselves - maybe introduce a sleepytot? There are definite pros to using dummies IF baby can find it and use it themselves.....

But I am glad we got rid of ours!

HTH

we went through this when DS had a dummy (I feel so good saying had, it has been a week without a dummy now!!)
Yes anyway where was I? lol
We went through a period of him losing it in the night and waking up not being able to settle himself back. I think it lasted until he could find it himself and put it back in. We just used to dot them about so he could find one easily enough.

I did a double take when I read this thread title as I could have written that myself a couple of months ago.

DS was always a terrible sleeper but started an awful pattern of waking every 45 mins/hour just wailing for his dummy from month 5-ish onwards?

He'd wake up wailing, one of us would find one for us or he'd find it himself then get back to sleep. But the cycle was just a little too short for us (going nuts after 6 m of no more than 3 hours sleep in a row!!)

We cut out dummy use at night, he uses it for daytime naps only, and it works fairly well! He does go to sleep without it at night, we frame it as sleeping time not naptime, in the day he still gets a dummy for his naps, no problem at all. We had to go through 2 or 3 nights of him adjusting to no dummy but it wasn't too bad, no painful extended crying etc.)

My twins were older (9mo) but the same thing suddenly started to happen with DT2 and I just went cold turkey. Couple of nights of taking a little more time to settle her at bedtime but otherwise all was fine. She still doesn't sleep well, but it's much better than it was.

If she's never woken wanting her dummy before, it seems a bit unlikely that she's doing it now. As lentil said, it may well be that she's waking for some other reason, but then naturally wanting the dummy once she's awake. One thing we've always done is to remove DS's dummy once he's properly asleep and put it out of reach, ie not in his cot (read this tip in a book somewhere). Don't know if that's the reason, but he's a brilliant sleeper (now 2.6) and never wakes in the night just because he wants his dummy. Added bonus is that if he's ill or has a nightmare or wakes for some other reason, then we can usually settle him pretty instantly just by giving him his dummy back. Just a thought.