Thursday night was by far the best!! I fed her at 7:00pm and we did the bedtime routine after that. She was in the bed at 8:00pm and get this...she cried for 5 minutes & fell asleep on her own!!! She stayed completely asleep!! She woke up at 10:00pm and cried for a few minutes, but it was more like a whimper kind-of cry and she went back to sleep after several minutes, so we didn't go in and get her. She ended up waking up to eat at 11:15pm, then 3:00am and 6:00am.Last night raised several other questions for me. First of all, she ate at 6:00am and she is totally one of those babies that wakes up with the sun. We don't have curtains for her room yet, so it's bright in there in the morning. There are these off-white kind of blinds, but no curtains. So if she wakes up to eat any time after 5:00am, it's getting light outside when we put her back down to sleep. Therefore she was pretty fussy and slept very lightly from about 6:30am to about 8:00am. She woke up for good at 8:00am - I think it's partly because of the light outside and partly because they started cutting the trees off the powerlines behind our house at about 7:30am, so she went in and out of sleep for a while after that. So anyway, I fed her at 8:30am because I had fed her at 6:00am. Waking up at 8:00am is what she has done all the other nights of sleep training so far, but she had eaten at 6:00am, so I wanted to keep her on an every 3 hour feeding schedule during the day if I could.
So first I didn't know if I should be worried about a consistent waketime in the morning or not. I knew she wouldn't be sleeping through the night at all right now, I was more doing the sleep training to help her learn to soothe herself - which she totally is! I wasn't as interested in getting her to sleep from 8:00pm to 8:00am. So 8:00pm to whenever she gets up for good in the morning is fine with me, although I don't think it has to be 6:00am. We also had trouble last night with her getting congested. Since new babies are primarily nose breathers, they breathe in dust and different things from the air at night and throughout the day and they can be congested - at least that's what I've been told. The doctor said she wasn't sick. But she had a hard time at the 3:00am feeding and we had to use the saline drops & aspirator and she HATES that. It was not fun having to do that in the middle of the night. I usually do it first thing in the morning.
Those were the different things that happened last night, but operation bedtime self-soothing seems to be working & that was the main concern!! She's still doing good falling back to sleep on her own in the middle of the night, too after feeding - except if she wakes up to eat at 6:00am or after. Grrrr. If she wakes up at 5:00am, we're good to go - she'll go right back to sleep and wake up at 8:00am.
I talked to my friend Laurel today and she gave me fabulous advice on scheduling & sleep training and different things like that! I asked her all kinds of mom questions not just related to my sleep training. I feel SO much better after talking to her! After our conversation, we are going to make 1 big change in our night-time routine. We are still going to feed her at 7:00pm, then do the bedtime routine and put her down at 8:00pm - BUT we are now going to wake her up at 10:30pm to eat one last time before we go to bed. Then we'll start letting her go as long as she wants to go between feedings at night after that. The goal would be for her to eventually go from 10:30pm to like 6 or 7 am. That would be awesome!
So I'll keep posting after our new changes. We are starting tonight with the 10:30pm feeding. Oh and just FYI, it's currently Night 4 as I write this and she cried again for 5 minutes & then went to sleep!! Looks like she may really have this figured out!! I'll post more tomorrow! I'm also starting nap training tomorrow after encouragement from Laurel. I'll let you know how that goes as well!!
Sleep Training Night #1
Sleep Training Night #2
Sleep Training Night#4
Sleep Training Night #5
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