Trying to Understand My Baby's Sleeping Schedule

S.,
You need to get the book Sleeping through the Night by Mindell. It was a life-saver for me, and I know it will be for you, as well. The point the book will make is that you baby needs to learn how to self-sooth. When she masters this skills, she will sleep through the night. You need to buy this book RIGHT AWAY since once you get back 6-8 months, it gets HARDER and HARDER to get them into this schedule. Good luck! J. - Mom of a 3-year old and a 9 month old.

Hi S.-- Here is a suggestion. Try letting her stay up until about7pm and give her some cereal with her last bottle. SOunds like she is waking up becuase she is hungry.....all that crawling around is hunger provoking! :) I did this with my daughter and at 2 1/2 months she was sleeping through the night.
GOOD LUCK

have you let her cry it out yet? i did that finally at 9 months w/ my son..who is now almost 23 months..now he sleeps thru the night unless i give him too much to drink before bed. the first night was the hardest..he cried for 28 minutes...woke once..cried for 5 minutes and went back to sleep. The next night he cried for about 10 minutes then went to sleep. A lot of people are for CIO and some are against it..but..my son now gets a proper night's sleep..so i say CIO.

S.
i am going through the same thing. my son is 7 onths old and he only sleeps about 6 hours "straight". he wakes up in the night at least a couple of times and soetimes by 2am he is up for the day. when i spoke to his doctor she recommended the ferber mnethod, but truthfully i dont have it in me. my husband and i both work so we have resorted to sleeping on the floor of his room after those "wake-up" sessions so we can try and soothe him back to sleep. this allows one of us to get rest and while the other tries to put him back to sleep. sometimes it takes 5 mintues other times it can take an hour. i am at a lost of what to do!

i wish you luck
sincerely
L.

this will be the hardest thing you have ever done. but you need to let her cry. bab's should be able to sleep thru the nite as early as 3 months. it is because we mom's train them to wake up that they have disturbed sleep patterns. give her 3 nights. and let her cry. no longer than an hour. and it is a pretty known fact that it takes babies 40 minutes to go back to sleep. i guarantee if you dont go in and pick her up for 3 nights and feed her a bottle, she will learn to sleep thru the nite. be strong, and if you need to go in and get her after an hour. let your husband do it. my baby sleeps thru the night and has since 4 months. it is because i had this sleep consultant come out and help us out. 3daysleepsolution.com her name is davis. she is tough, but good. i didnt like her at first because i thought she was too harsh. bbut babies need their sleep. your baby is not hungry in the middle of the night, she just wants comfort. and you and the bottle are it. she needs to learn to fall asleep herself and then you will be much better off. good luck.

Are you feeding her? Solid food decreases the need for constant liquids. Evely H

Hi S.,

I have an 11 month old son and he is exactly the same way - he crawled at 6 months and walked at 9. He is just now starting to sleep 10 hours through the night, so don't worry - it will get better. At 8 months old I was up with mine just as you are describing. At about 10 months I started a very religious night-time regime and slowly started waiting longer and longer before I would go in his room when he woke up at night. After about 2 weeks of this, he started putting himself back to sleep when he woke up and now he sleeps 10 hours strait through. The nighttime regime seemed to really help - we do a bath, massage and story. I never thought my squirmy baby would stay still long enough for a massage, but he has really grown to love it. Good luck!

Find out how much she sleeps during the day. With all that crawling she is going to burning heaps of energy and needs a heap more. It won't last forever, both my babies were like this and if you get a really good day routine and only one nap, then the baby will adjust. Feed her more solids (if she will take it) at night but keep her bed routine as regular as can be. Remember it will happen so keep going!!!

Maybe she is not getting full on that last bottle before bed. Try putting a little bit of cereal in her last bottle, just enough to make it a little thick. See if she sleeps a little longer. If so, you can adjust the amount of cereal in the bottle until she sleeps to the time you would like. Us working parents would love it if our babies could give us a break during the week sometimes!

My son is 8 now, but when he was a baby he would not sleep through the night at 6 months. The doctor told me to just let him cry it out, if I don't, all my nights will be ruined. So for a couple days I only woke up once a night to feed him, then after a week I stopped waking up for him. It was hard hearing him cry, but I did what the doctor told me to do.
Then after a couple of days he started sleeping about 7-8 hours a night. I mean they will wake up early, but you should be able to get a few good hours of sleep! Hope it works out.

I used to give my daughter a bottle and a bowl of cereal before bed, around 6:30-7:00. Then she slept 7:30-2 am and woke up to nurse then slept 2:15-7:00. This went on until she was nine months old. If your daughter is eating each time she wakes that seems a bit odd to me. She could be doing out of habit. If you are giving her a bottle at night start gradually diluting it with water until after a few night it is all just water. If waking is just a habit for her she may start sleeping a bit longer. This may also help her to eat more during the day keeping her fuller longer.

Try decreasing the feeding by a little every night till eventually you just give her water. Also maybe an earlier bedtime?....(I don't know when you put her to bed now) I know it seems like it would do the opposite, but Dr Weissbluth (author of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Baby) they usually end up sleeping in later. It worked for our twins. He also has a lot of suggestions for stopping unnecessary night waking...he most strongly recommends letting them Cry it out, but has other suggestions as well. (If CIO is not something you are comfortable with) You should try his book!

Hi, S.,
I saw your question and had to respond. Sleep deprivation for all of you is so exhausting. I am a nurse and a naturopath and have owned a family practice for 33 years. In the years I have worked with thousands of infants. Sounds like your daughter may be very active in general. I have had a lot of success getting babies to sleep better right away with natural remedies, sometimes a change in diet. All babies should sleep through the night. A warm bath in a quieted house, followed by a bit of rice cereal at night, then the bottle, may help. Cranial therapy, very light hands-on therapy that is less pressure than a baby's hat, can allow tension in the neck and head to self-correct. Many times even the most gentle birth can leave some direct boney pressure on the brain stem that signals babies to be hyper-alert until is is released. Often baby sleeps better after one treatment. Just find a practitioner with a lot of experience and good results who has treated a lot of children. Interview them first as much as possible. Feel free to call if you have questions.

Wishing you and your family all the best,
A. Szaur ###-###-####

HI S.,

I haven't read the thread of reponses to your request, so apologies if this advice has been given to you already. I just had to write because your little girl and mine have so much in common. My daughter is also 8 months old, an incredibly active bundle of energy who has been crawling since a little before 6 months and her sleeping pattern was throwing this working mom off enirely. I get up really early for work, so waking up in the middle of the night was not working for me.

I read up on sleep training, assessed my situation (between what I could put up with and what I think she could handle) and I chose the Ferber method. Look into it a liittle further but basically, you train the child to sleep as long as their little bodies should at this age - somewhere between 12 and 14 hours a day (including naps). Keeping a firm schedule is KEY to any sleep training method. Put her down at a set time EVERY night and when she wakes up, do not reach for a bottle or a diaper change because that's just what she's looking for. My daughter knew that with a cry, mommy would come in with food and attention. She has no sense of time so she didn't know it was the middle of the night, she just knows how to get me to pay attention to her and that wasn't helping her develop a healthy sleeping pattern. It worked for us to let her cry, go in at 5 min. then at 10 then at 15 min, etc. and rub or pat her back to let her know we're there but NEVER picking her up. She evetually gave up her crying method. possibly because she figured it just wasn't working anymore. After just three nights of this, she has been sleeping through the night for 11 hours straight without a wimper.

Good luck!!

Hi,

I'm a working mom of 8 yr.old Max and 6 year old Ruby. Sounds like your daughter needs to stay up a little longer after her evening bottle, possibly an hour. Also, you may want to give her some cereal with her last meal of the evening so she will not wake up from hunger.
Best,
D. M

Every baby is different and I felt the same way you do. Every one of my friends babies had been sleeping thru the night for months while my 10 month old still woke up 2-3 times a night. The good news is that he started sleeping thru the night (at least being able to put himself back to sleep when he wakes up) at 1 year. Make sure you are not jumping up and going to her at the first sound. I found that by letting him fuss for a few minutes (not frantic crying) was the first step to allowing him to learn how to fall asleep on his own. Having lovies in his crib helped as well. Good luck.

My Dr. told me that babies are able to sleep through the night by that age. Their tummies have grown enough that they do not need to eat frequent small meals anymore & can go at least 8 hours at night without needing to be fed. I would transition her to more sleep by going to her when she cries, but not offering her a bottle. Just change her diaper if she needs it & then tell her good night & put her back in bed. Be as quiet & non-engaging as possible & she will start to realize that there is no longer any reason for her to wake up so often.

With my kids (2), I would give them some baby cereal before they went to bed. I can't remember if I nursed at this time also... I would also pump if I gave them cereal and didn't nurse at that time. I would mix breast milk with the cereal. My kids were active too....

Let her cry when she wakes up after a few days the crying will get shorter and shorter. when she realizes you are not coming to get her she will sleep through the night. It will take about a week of torture letting her cry, but she should be sleeping 10 to 12 hours through the night.

I had the same problem with my two year old. I keep the stimulas low key at night. In other words not alot of playing around or getting them excited. A warm bath and warm rice cereal and a bottle holds them more through the night I found worked for him. The cereal held him longer through the night. Hope this works for you.......R. marclle

well,my baby never slept through the night...shes 14months old and still doesnt...but i nurse her..and shes sleeps with us in bed so i dont really have to wake up...but now that shes getting so big i want to cut out night time nursing so i can finally sleep a whole night too...its rough when they dont sleep,but from my experience its quite normal

Hi! I am a mother of 4 with 5 grandchildren. My first question to you is, what do you do when she wakes up? Do you give her time to settle herself down and go back to sleep? Do you go in and not picking her up soothe her?
Just because she wakes up doesn't mean that she is hungery. Maybe she has had a bad dream. Yes, they do dream. Another thing, she maybe cold. Some people don't sleep well if they are cold. Also, by the time that you get into her room to pick her up, is she really screaming. If that is the case, you might want to use a baby monitor so that you are getting to her before she gets really upset. The most important place to start is to try and find out why she is waking up. If she really is hungery, then nothing you do is going to help until she grows to the point that she can go without eat for 8 to 10 hours. It will happen some day. I know that that doesn't help much now. Hope that this has been of some help.

S.

Dear S.,

Sorry, I have no advice - just my story and opinion (I seem to say that a lot here . . .)

I think that this is a personal thing - meaning everyone is different and will sleep through the night on their own schedule - some say that bottle fed or cereal fed babies sleep better longer - my own situation refutes this. Everything I read at this time said that sleeping through the night for an infant is different than how we normally think of it - that sleeping through the night for babies means 4-5 hours at a time. My son (bless his heart), at five weeks (and by the way, breast-fed only) went five hours one night, then ten hours the next. The third night, he woke up after five hours again, but the fourth, he slept ten hours AGAIN. On the fifth night, when he woke up after five hours, I said, "No way!," stuck his pacifier in his mouth and patted his bottom and he went back to sleep for another five hours. He slept ten hours through the night from that point on . . . My "baby" was also a very good sleeper (and also breast-fed only - at least at this point) and was sleeping through the night by the time I went back to work when she was six weeks old. (This was always a concern for me because I have worked graveyard since my son was born, and worried about asking someone else to get up with my baby during the night.) We went through some other issues with my baby, however, and at six months, I was told that I needed to wake her and feed her during the night (which I found slightly insane). I was able to stop feeding her through the night around 12-18 months. But when she was three and four, she was still not able to get through the night without getting up. It was my mother who made the connection between her still getting up at this age, and the fact that I had been instructed to wake her and feed her through the night as a baby. (The good news is that she did eventually out grow that habit - thank God! - and at fifteen sleeps through the night just fine.) Circumstances when my middle child joined our family were not easy from the beginning - though I had a normal pregnancy and delivery (though REALLY fast!), and even though she was my biggest baby at eight and a half pounds, she spent a week in the NICU with pneumonia, my two year old had a horrible stomach flu a month later that lasted an entire week, and then one week after returning to work, I came down with chicken pox (which of course I passed on to the two year old and then the two month old! It was the longest six weeks of my life!) So, wouldn't it just figure that her sleep pattern would be screwed up, too. I don't know when it really started, but I noticed it when I was nearly hysterical with fever from the chicken pox. She wanted to play all night long. She was wide awake and happy - as long as she had company. But I had a fever - and it was going up. I finally told her, "I don't care what you do, I need some sleep, I have to get up with your brother in a couple hours," and I parked her in her bassinet across the house (and then listened to her cry through the vents). I tried to keep her awake during the day so that she would sleep at night, but when I was too sick to watch the kids and gave them up to my husband, he simply followed her lead, so when I was better, she was up all night and sleeping all day. Now this I fought - I woke her up every two hours during the day to feed her in an attempt to get her on a more normal day/night sleep schedule. Honestly, if she had been my first baby, I don't know if I would have ever had another. (And by the way - she is still my most difficult child at seventeen!)

I know that we all need our babies to sleep through the night, because our lives don't stop when we are blessed with their presence, but unfortunately they all do this in their own time.

Good luck! And remember, this too shall pass!
B.

I am a working mom too, and my son who is now 11 months is active, he too always wakes up to eat then goes back to sleep, my friends claim their babies sleep through the night. I figure they must not hear them if they do wake up.(j/k, all kids are different) This probably sounds like bad advice, but, I have to work(Hubby too!). My son goes to bed with us at 10:30pm, I keep a disposable, ready to feed bottle at the bedside, so when he wakes, i shake it, pop a nipple on it and go back to sleep. We as a family have done this since he was six weeks old when i went back to work, and getting out of bed for us was worse. We are happy, we get to work on time, and I do not feel guilty at all.

By 8 months she should absolutely NOT need to eat during the night. Ideally she should be able to sleep 10-12 hours at night without waking, and if she does, she should be able to self sooth back to sleep. A book that saved my sanity is Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth MD. In a nutshell.... "approach to your child's sleep in this complete guiding to solving -- and preventing -- sleep problems. Includes a step-by-step program for establishing good sleep habits and individualized guidelines from infancy throughout the growing years." And if you are thinking that you have no time to read, it happens to be very easy reading and well worth the time spent. My kids have been sleeping 12 hours at night (without waking) since 5 months old. They are now 3 and 5 and they still sleep about 10 hours. Start training early, otherwise you will have trouble in the toddler years. Good Luck

I also have an 8 month old. It's natural developementally for them to start waking up again. She is burning more calories now that she crawling around all day, so she may actually need those at night. You can try adding in some more calories through the day, maybe closer to bedtime. Sleep disturbances often go hand-in-hand with reaching major milestones in cognitive and motor development and with separation anxiety. It helps to make sure there is a regular routine. Your baby will usually take two naps at this age. Both the afternoon and the morning nap typically last one to two hours. You could try cutting a 1/2 hour or so from her naps. Each baby is different and she may be getting a little bit too much sleep through the day, she may possibly add that to her night sleep. But no matter what her personal average, she'll sleep less at night if she takes extra-long naps. I hope I helped some, mine was doing the same thing so I did some deep research. Good luck!

My advice would be to fill her bottle up with water for her nighttime feedings. She just might realize that water isn't all that exciting to keep waking up for. By not sending your baby to bed with a bottle of milk or giving her milk during the night your also decreasing her chance of developing early cavities.

Please remember that all babies are different. Your little girl's needs may be different than your friends children... and that is perfectly okay. I've been in a parenting group for 7 years and one of the things I've learned is that you cannot force your kids to be hungry or tired! I have two children who have always had very different sleep patterns, one a great sleeper and napper the other NEVER napped past the age of eighteen months...
On the other hand, if you think that she is waking up early (and or often) due to hunger talk with your doc...maybe she simply needs more to eat. Good luck!

It's normal and healthy for her to be waking up after 6 hours. Unfortunately for us as parents, our sleep cycles are different. But her waking up frequently puts her a lower risk for SIDS. Since she's really active, she may need the extra calories she's getting throughout the night. This is probably so if she's taking more than 2 ounces before she falls asleep again. Also, as long as she's getting enough TOTAL sleep in a 24 hour period, she should be ok. Sleep deprivation can lead to hyperactivity. If you're still unsure, check with her pediatrician.

Join the club IM up now and its 4:30am with a 7 month old daughter that his wide awake.
She wakes up every 2 to 4 hours to eat and for naps I can get about 15 out of her.
This happened with my son also and he was about 3 when he slept thru the night.
ALl babies are different and I try not to compare my to anyone elses. My children are just active non sleepers but at least they are healthy and the lack of sleep for some reason does not get to me.
C.

Hi, S. -
We've had the same issue with "sleeping problems" with our 7 month old. He would wake up at 1 am and 5 am nightly. However, this advice HAS seemed to help us make progress! Our pediatrician recommended this at our 4 month & 6 month appointments: She says - in the middle of the night, he's not really hungry, and his stomach is big enough to eat/drink enough at dinner to sustain him through the night. (of course, he seems hungry, since all babies will be soothed back to sleep at night by food) She recommended to simply NOT give him a bottle in the middle of the night to start training him to sleep through. In addition, she recommended waiting at least 20-30 minutes before responding to middle of the night crying. This is PAINFUL for parents, but sure enough, we found that after about 15 mintues, most times he just falls back to sleep. This works for the 5 am wake up as well.
We've found in the last month, this has been tricky, since he's rolling over, and sometimes gets stuck in a corner of his crib. When this happens, we go in, turn him over onto his back, give him his stuffed dog that he sleeps with and his pacifier, and we LEAVE THE ROOM. It takes a while of repeated tries (and honestly some nights have been really hard where it's taken 1 1/2 hours to get him back to sleep), but it seems to be working.
I found this website really helpful for sleeping trouble at 8 months. Check it out: http://www.kidshealth.org/parent/growth/sleep/sleep812m.html
Good luck!

Normal is such a subjective word... they say "most" babies sleep through the night at around 6 months, but not all. I can totally relate- it sounds just like Izzy at that age. She was a crawling pro, and she started to walk at 9.5 months (so heads up!), AND she didn't sleep through the night until (take a deep breath) 11.5 months, and even then I had to put my food down.

It all depends on two things- does she eat to fall asleep (bad!), and does she need that bottle in the night? Only you (and her, of course) will know the answer to these two questions and you will have to evaluate from there. If she is eatting in order to fall asleep, you'll have to break her of that habit. If you feel that she doesn't need the bottle at night you'll have to figure out what you're comfortable doing about that. Lots of people try to sub the binky (if she uses one), and she will probably protest. Izzy didn't use a binky at that age, so I tried something that one of my mom friends suggested- when she woke up for a bottle I gave her water instead of formula. The first night she drank the water and went back to sleep. The second and third night she fought with me for an hour and a half, drank a little, and went back to sleep. After that she slept 10-12 hours, and she has ever since (she's 18mo now). It basically comes down to you have to loose a little extra sleep to gain some in the long run- but only if you feel she doesn't need that night bottle.

Good luck!

Way normal, hello? Your daughter is not even one yet. I have three active sons...and they ate all the time. Get used to the sleep deprivation...for awhile. Yes, mine would wake up every 4 hours. If I was lucky!

Hi S. T.
I'm a mom with a 23 year old and a 14 year old, and I am currently a new grandmother to a 3 1/2 month old that lives with me. When my daughter was a baby she also did not have a very good sleep schedule. I asked her Ped about it and she recommended that on her last feeding of the night, I give her a little bit of baby cereal. This would cause her stomach to be a little more heavy and full and would be less likely for her to wake up hungry so often. I tried it and it worked like charm. We have not started cereal on the baby yet, but trust me, if he is anything like his mother, I think I will probably be doing the same thing.

Hope it works

V.