13 month great sleeper but not through the night

[joesephina]

Hi
My baby girl is a great sleeper.  She goes down for naps and her night sleep with hardly ever crying and self soothes herself to sleep everytime.  However, she has never slept through the night.  On a good night she'll wake up twice, on a bad night it could be hourly.
Her routine is outlined below.
7am wake up
7.30am breakfast (toast/cereal or banana)
10am nap for at least an hour, up to two hours.
12noon breast feed , activity, lunch
2pm nap for one hour
3pm activity, snack, breast feed
5pm nap for one hour
6pm breast feed and dinner
7pm bed til at least 10pm, sometimes midnight.  Then wakes up at 2am, and 5am. 

When she wakes up at night I breastfeed her as I don't want her to wake my 6 year old son or husband up.  On the few times I have tried letting her cry it out she can cry for an hour with no let up.  When I go in she is pretty much instantly happy and her crocodile cries disappear.  She sleeps in her own room.  When I try pu/pd she will let it go on for an hour and then I give in to a breast feed.

Help.  My 5 year old slept through after one night of training around 7 months but I am struggling with my little girl. 
Jo

[anna*]

OK, I've got a couple of observations which I hope might help.

1) It's pretty unusual for a 13 month old to still be having 3 naps. Can she really only manage 2 hours awake in the middle of the day? I wonder if you can try pushing that A time out so that she has two good naps, maybe 1.5hrs at 10 and 1.5hrs at 3?

2) the thing with PUPD is that you have to stick at it. If you give up and breastfeed, all you're teaching her is that if she cries for a really long time she will eventually get BF.

3) I think it's perhaps inevitable that there will be some crying with sleep training. Perhaps your son could stay the night at his grandparents so taht you can make a good start on PUPD? I think that getting the naps down might help with NWs, but it's possibly unlikely that she'll drop all night feeds without some training

4) Can you settle her any other way? Does patting/stroking her back or stroking her hair help?

anna
x

[Colin Macs Mom]

Just want to second everything that Anna said. She really needs to be on three naps. And this is probably not what you want to hear, but if you want her to sleep at night you need to commit to not giving in on the BF.