Hi and welcome!
The fact that you are doing this:
currently follow the order of E, A, S - only eats after sleep
is already huge! This is a struggle for many people who start EASY, so you are already half way there
.
The first and most important thing for me to mention is that NOT feeding at night AT ALL - is probably going to effect your milk supply, but worse than that, your baby being EBF and so young still needs to feed at night. There are very few babies who drop NF in the early months. I can tell you that my LO was FF and we only managed to completely drop them when he was 6m old, after weeks of gradually reducing the bottles.
Saying that, there is also no reason for her to feed every hour or two at night. I think what is happening is that she wakes up (like we all do, but we don't notice it) but is not able to self settle back to sleep.
You mentioned that you are planning or already doing PU/PD. Tracey meant for PU/PD to be a last resort, after pat/shh hasn't worked. Your LO is older than 4m which is the age one can start PU/PD, but I found that pat/shh works much better at this age. It's much more gentle and young babies respond well to it. Do you have Trace's books? She gives there a detailed description on how to do pat/shh. If not, there is very good information here:
A Special Sleep Interview with Tracy HoggTeaching Sleep to Babies of 3-5 months (and the 45 min nap)What you could do for night time, to reduce the feeds and to teach him to self settle is to decide what times you are going to feed at night. For example, you can decide that you are giving a DF between 22 and 23 before you go to bed (more on that here:
Cluster & Dreamfeeding FAQ's - Starting, how to do it, stopping & problems ) and then decide to feed at 1ish and 4ish. Every other NW you are settling with pat/shh and not feeding till it's time.
Now, I am not going to lie to you, you are going to have a few very rough nights. Pat/shh and PU/PD are not cry free methods. They are methods that you can teach your baby to be a more independent sleeper while you are there for him at all times and he is not left alone.
But another thing that needs to be tackled is the day time routine. It would be helpful if you can post your day in an EASY format so we can have a look at his A times and naps and see what can be tweaked.
TBH, his A times sound ok to me, not low or high for his age, so I can think of two things that might be happening. One is that he is not able to go through the sleep cycles himself. For this you can either use W2S or HTTJ (there is more about that here:
How do I address habitual wakings? (wake-to-sleep and other methods) ). The other thing that can happen is that he wakes up because he is hungry. I know that the book talks about 4h EASY at this age, but in fact most EBF can't manage such a long gap between feeds. It's more around 6m that they can handle that. What most mommies do is either feed in the middle of A time, so your EASY will look like this: AEASAEAS, or you offer another top up short before the nap is due. It can be 15-20min before the nap and it would be good if there is a little bit of A time before S, even a nappy change or something like that.
Are you keeping a log of his day? It would be good to his what length of A is resulting in what nap. After a few days of keeping a log you can look back at it and see if you can find any patterns. For most babies 30-35min naps are OT (so too much A) and 45min-1:20h nap are UT (so not enough A). But a pattern you can only see after a few days, if you get a 45min nap one day you can't conclude anything about it.
You should also consider OS and that he has a good WD (
What does a good wind down consist of (Includes 4S ritual))
is still swaddled tight for all sleeps (except when in stroller or car seat)
That's great, I would keep with that IIWY, only start weaning when he start rolling because then it's not safe anymore.
uses a white noise machine (Sleep Sheep) to fall asleep when at home ... is this a "prop"?
White noise is also great. I am not sure if it's a prop or not, I know that many mommies here use them till very late. My DS still can only sleep with his white noise
.
Re the paci, it's not always a prop. If LO is dependent on it to fall asleep or wakes up constantly for it to be repluged then yeah, it probably is. But I wouldn't worry about it too much. In my experience (and I was also like that in the beginning) EASY is extremely difficult if things are rigid. We all have different ways of falling asleep, staying asleep and we all have different sleep needs - so do our babies. If you find that there are props or AP that works for your LO and you are HAPPY with it, then go for it.
When I tried implementing EASY with DS I did sleep training just by the book, but it didn't work. I had days and days of crying - he was crying and I was crying. The moment I realized that he there are things he likes and doesn't like WRT his sleep, we were all happier. We had all naps in the pram till DS was 5m and we were feeding to sleep
That's what worked for him and I never looked at it as a prop because I was so happy with his long naps. When I knew he was ready and we were as well we did pat/shh and it worked after just a couple of days.
BW is not about keeping a schedule and doing things by the book, it's about recognizing your baby's needs and your family and combining them together.
So good luck! I am here if you want to post your EASY and if you have more questions
. I know this is a lot to take in and a lot of reading to do, but as someone who has been where you are right now I can tell you that it's worth it
.
