Our version of sleep training

"Does your baby sleep through the night yet?"

This seems to be the question of the day and it's one I get asked all the time about Will. My answer, no but we're working on it. Here's how we're working on it (nothing scientific here, this is all trial and error and honestly we really have no clue what the hell we're doing!)...

Will has always been a fairly good sleeper, especially at night. He generally goes to bed without a fight and only wakes to eat then goes back to sleep (the daytime is a different story I'll save for another post).

From the time the baby nurse started, when Will was 1 week old, we put him on a bedtime routine. We start with a warm bath, then give him a little baby massage, a clean diaper with his bottom slathered in diaper rash cream (we try to limit night time diaper changes so the diaper rash cream has been important), jammies and his night time feeding. When we feed him this night time bottle we dim the lights, put the TV on mute and play soothing music to "set the mood" for sleep. Regardless how much or how often he feeds at night, we always start with this routine.

After doing a little research online (again I resorted to Dr. Goo.gle), we decided to give cluster feeding a try. Will's bedtime feeding is at 8pm so we started giving him a feed at 6pm to "fill his tank" before he went to sleep. This worked OK and bought us an extra 30-45 minutes, so we thought we would add a dreamfeed as well (yes, both at the same time). Hubby would get Will up at 10pm and feed him again. Will was usually coherent enough to take a bottle but not awake. Again, this only bought us about an extra 30 minutes. We were doing both of these techniques together for 3-4 days.

We realized with the extra dreamfeed, Will was getting way too much to eat in one day causing him to spit up a lot more than usual. We cut out the dreamfeed and it made no difference to Will, he still slept the extra 30 minutes or so. Apparently it worked since we got a little more sleep time from him and had no adverse reaction when we stopped it.

We kept the cluster feed for an addition 4 days or so after stopping the dreamfeed but eventually eliminated it after realizing it wasn't doing anything additional for us after the initial 30-45 minutes extra we got.

So what does this all mean? Well, for Will it seems that these two techniques got him (and us) and little extra sleep but it's a slow process and I think as he gets older he'll naturally stretch out his sleeping times. The one other thing we've done is stretch his daytime feedings a little. Instead of feeding him every 3 hours we usually go between 3.5 and 4.5 depending on his naps. He's getting used to going a little longer between feedings and that seems to help at night.

We're moving him from the bassinet in our bedroom to his crib in the next week or so, and we're hoping once he's settled into his crib we can start to work on eliminating the 5am feeding. I think we're going to try a dreamfeed scenario at 5am and see if we can make that work for us again. Who knows?!?!

I wish I had a magic answer for getting Will to sleep well at night, but I don't. It's just been lots of trial and error with some rough nights thrown into the mix. But to anyone looking for answers to sleeping longer at night I suggest you try either cluster feeding or dreamfeeding or a combination of both. And make sure the baby is getting enough food during the day as well as enough day time sleep (but not too much day time sleep!).