7 Month Old Terrible Sleeper at Night & Naps! HELP!

I have found that the hardest time during parenting is when you have an audience. What would you do if you lived with just your husband and kids? Do that and ask for patience from your in-laws. Ask them to remember when their kids were little. I'm sure they will think back and probably be able to sympathize with you. As long as you aren't "slacking off" and just ignoring the baby I am sure they will understand. Good luck with this stage and keep positive thoughts about your house selling so your family can get back to normal!

~V

When my son was your daughter's age, he was waking several times in the night, too. Will she eat when you offer the breast or is she just using it to soothe herself back to sleep? My son was an eater meaning he would actively suck and swallow for some time before he'd fall back to sleep. Our pediatrician recommended giving him a rice bottle (actually putting rice flakes in with expressed milk - or formula - with a fast flow nipple) right before bed. Since that was one of my only changes to breastfeed him directly, I didn't exactly want to do that, but what we did instead was give that to him the first time he woke in the night. This seemed to help fill him up and get him through until morning. Again, according to our pediatrician, waking once at that age was normal. It wasn't until he was nine months that she suggested working on getting him through the night (which was a whole other ordeal). As for napping... maybe she's ready to cut down to two naps which might help make them longer? If you'd like a detailed breakdown of my son's "schedule" at that age, feel free to e-mail me (I don't want to bore everyone with the specifics). If nothing else, know that you're not alone out there. Welcome to the OC!

Hi A. - my little boy, 3 1/2 months, has the same sleep patterns, i wrote in about 2 weeks ago. I downloaded an e-book from www.thesleeplady.com which had some good recommendations... but what seemed to help (last week) was swaddling him... it increased his naps significantly... but this weekend was bad again, back to 30 minute naps. Attempted for an hour yesterday to get him back down for his nap when he woke 30 minutes into it... finally gave up and let him stay awake until bed time. Last night i put him down at 7:00 and he was up again at 10:30... i'm wondering if it's a growth spurt or something.. but i do feel like it's not enough sleep during the day -- i understand your frustration! Sorry can't be of more help, but i'll be reading your responses, too! Best of luck!
M.

this is one of those things that you have to look into your mamas instinct for, not in a book written by some doctor that doesnt know your baby, and it doesnt matter how much experience he has because its not better than a mothers instinct when it comes down to this sort of thing.

with my first two kids i did attachment parenting, we slept with our kids and we all slept GREAT! i was a heavy sleeper then so it worked out, because i would just automatically put my baby on the breast when they woke up at night.

but with my third little guy, for some reason i couldnt sleep anymore when he was in the bed with us (by now our older kids are in their own beds) so i tried to breastfeed him at night and put him back down, that was horrible! no sleep whatsoever! i was the crankiest mama! so i figured out that he loves to swing so much that he falls right to sleep once he is in the swing. so i tried putting him in there at night, and he slept all night long! he also slept there for naps. he didnt even want to feed during the night, but boy was he hungry in the morning! so i started to feed him an extra serving at dinner before he went to bed. and he did great again! so we used that for a while until he got sick of it then we put him in a little crib and now he still sleeps all night and hes so good about it too, he is 11 months now and we started this at about 7 months. i think he didnt like the bed or crib at first because he was having acid reflux and it hurt to lie down.

sometimes you need to let them cry and sometimes it doesnt work to do that.
this is what worked for our little ones, you have to find out what works for yours! and im sure you realized by now that every child is so different!

good luck!