Who knows where this should go? Sleep, bfing, torture chamber...

[phdlife]

I've come to the conclusion that I am NOT, in fact, being a wuss when it comes to weaning 2.10 dd. In fact SHE is being extremely difficult about it. She doesn't want to give up her night feeds at all, no way, no how, no thank you ma'am, and she ain't takin' no for an answer.

It took me 3 weeks to get her to drop the 3:30am feed. Three weeks of her waking, asking, being reminded that we don't have mummy milk til the sun's up, screaming/kicking with rage, begging, sobbing, pleading, sucking her thumb and groping my cleavage for whatever scrap of comfort she could find, finally dropping off to sleep, only to start the whole process again half an hour later. (The pleading was the worst: her thinking that, if screaming and sobbing hadn't convinced me, saying "please, mummy" in her nicest, albeit hiccupy, voice, might persuade me how desperately she wanted it.)

And for what? Now she wakes at 4:20. I feed her, because I'm still exhausted from the last round, but guess what? She doesn't want to let go, and when I ask her to, we go through the whole screaming with rage, begging, sobbing, pleading, sucking her thumb and groping my cleavage for whatever scrap of comfort she can find business again. Only now, the fecking birds are at it (dawn chorus my ass, it's more like dawn cacophany around these parts - think parrots, millions and milions of squawking bloody parrots) or the sun's up or she's cold (because she refuses to have a blanket) and more often than not, she doesn't get back to sleep. Or if she does, it takes an hour, by which time there's no chance of me getting back to sleep.

I'm bloody tired of these 4:30am starts. You'd think I could adjust my goddamn body clock to go to bed at 9pm or something, but frankly after I've wrestled ds to bed at 8, I really seem to need a good two hours to work through the day and turn my brain off.

(If you're wondering why she's still feeding at night at all, it's because I went through all this twice with the 1am feed, once with the 3am feed, then she grew some fecking molars and we were back to square one.)

I just have to grit my teeth and find the energy to go through it again. Rah.

God sounds awful - poor you and her!

I have not been able to face night weaning at all as I imagine I would have to go through what you are going through - and I am a wuss! I basically get into DD's bed around 1am and let her feed on and off till morning. This is not doing wonders for my marriage but at least I get some sleep!

Good luck though - I wish I had your backbone!

goodness.

i'll probably be the only one saying this, but i'd go back to just feeding her when she wakes. especially if she then sleeps a bit longer!
it sounds like she is not quite ready to give it up yet... but she will be!

sorry am re-reading....

maybe try wake to sleep?
that's when you wake them around 1hr-45 minutes before they nirmally wake, to disrupt the sleep cycle. you don't have to properly wake her right up,just rouse her slightly, then she will hopefully be in a deeper stage of sleep at her normal wakin time

if she DOES wake right up then i'd just feed back to sleep

I agree she's not ready, I just can't come up with a solution that will work for both of us :(

also, lightly rousing her = screaming/yelling/kicking (it's her personality, always has been, even putting a blanket over her can have this effect) and I am struggling with the feeding her back to sleep because my tolerance for the teeth-grindingly irritating 'dummy suck' that she reverts to after a minute or so wears off waaaayyy before she's ready to let go of my nipple.

I'm just shattered after doing it for nearly three years, you know? Or more accurately, nearly three years with her and 18m for ds (with only a six-month gap, during which we moved countries, in between). The chronic fatigue is making me a much less nice mummy than I'd like to be. It's not fair to ds at all.

also, with wake to sleep - what's to stop her just resetting her body clock to that 'hour earlier' wake time?

i guess it's a risk you have to be prepared to take before you start lol. i know people who have had great success with it, but i'm sure there are others who it hasn't worked for.

i do knoiw what you mean about having just had enough of it though, i got like that big time with ds2 but thankfully he was happy having some oat milk with DP and so DP got to do the night feed for a while until he naturally dropped it by himself.

how is she if you are not there? do you have a partner who could try settlin her in the night?

think she's doing wake to sleep herself - 3:55 this morning

if she wakes in the evening, when we're still up, and he goes down, she goes mental, so I guess she would at night too. besides, dh doesn't hear anything - which is kind of a blessing as he is so bear with a sore head if he is woken up. sigh.

4:30 again this morning. tried to put her off with the "not til the birds come up" line and an offer of water. copped a quarter-hour of screaming rage, then half an hour of sniffling and desperate groping of my chest. By which time the sun was coming up and so she asked, "mummy milk now please?" so I fed her. she's gone back to sleep at last, but I'm too pissed off. I just can't see a way out of this.

the thing is, I don't even want to wean her. I just want some fecking sleep.

You poor thing, can you express in the evening and try a bottle at night so she is not attatched to you? She will start to need milk less but it is hard to see it as anything but a bad habit sometimes (my ds is the same at the mo and only 5 months so dread trying to night wean)