ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman - Babies sleeping through the night: “Now that he’s put down he’ll cry here and there, but we believe he’s to young for us to Ferber him (in the hardcore way). However, we do avoid picking him up when he’s down as it just starts the whole process over. We stoke his face and comb his hair and generally watch for the difference between “sobbing” and “crying.” He sobs when he’s tired, he cries when something’s wrong.”
Amelia is 4 months old. She’s been sleeping from about 6:30Pm to 2:30-3ish AM for a few weeks now. We initially set her bedtime at 8, but came to realize after reading a couple of books and having a few hellish nights of daddy trying to get a baby that is hysterically overt-tired and over-stimulated to bed that we needed to move it up a little. Now she goes down easily at 6ish, but she still wakes up at about 3. She wakes up at other points during the night, but after a few grunts and groans will put herself back to sleep without us.
One thing that we have been doing to make sure she doesn’t wake up hungry is to dream feed her at about 8:30 or 9. What is dream feeding? Well, basically you feed the baby while she’s asleep. Young babies won’t wake up if you are careful and will feed until the are full. You see it a lot if you breast feed on-demand overnight. So, after she’s been asleep for about 3 hours, I creep into her bedroom, bottle in hand. Gently pick her up out of her crib, touch the bottle to her lips. She opens up her mouth and starts sucking. Sometimes she falls asleep while she’s dream feeding for a little while, but then she wakes up and continues until she’s full or the bottle is empty. Usually she eats between 6-9 oz when she is dream feeding.
Now we are attempting to move her to the next step, actually two next steps. 1) She shouldn’t be waking up at 3AM at 4 months. She’s not hungry, it’s just a habit she’s picked up and we’ve re-enforced. 2) We’re going to move her from a 3 hour schedule to a 4 hour schedule. We started this week, we try to move each feeding out to four hours. Today i’ve managed to put her off for 3.5 hours each time. I bet by Saturday she’ll be a four hours. That means, more sleep for her and us at night. She should be sleeping between 1.5-2 hours during each nap when we finish moving her schedule. Today she’s made it at least 1.5 hours for both of her naps. If this pattern holds up, she won’t wake up until momma gets home from work this afternoon.
Once she’s on a four hour schedule, the next step is for us to quit being her human sleep props. We don’t bounce her or sway with her anymore. But we still sing to her and rock her in a rocking chair to put her to sleep. (although this afternoon after visiting with everyone at my office, she fell asleep on my shoulder with out any prompting when I walked up stairs with her. I sat in the chair and rocked about a minute, then put her down. We’re going to start the Pick up/Put down method described in the Baby Whisperer books sometime next week to help her with this habit. We got some bad advice, and then further misinterpreted the advice early on about bouncing and rocking her to sleep. But I think we did the right thing at the time. If she didn’t get to sleep, her crying would escalate until she would start to choke or vomit. We wanted to avoid that at all costs and did whatever we could to calm her down. If having her watch me chug a glass of congealed yak fat would have calmed her down the first two months of her life, believe me I would have done it!