dreamfeed

[roisin]

I can't get my 8 week DS to successfully take a dreamfeed and then sleep for longer than 3 hours. He takes his last feed at about 7pm and if undisturbed will sleep until 12:30-1:00am. I have tried giving him a dreamfeed at 10:30-11:00 on 3-4 consecutive nights, only to have him wake 3 hrs later and take another full feed. He then wakes every 2 1/2-3hours. He usually does a poo after each feed, which means changing him. I think this is disrupting the "dreamfeed" and therefore disrupting his natural sleep pattern.

Any suggestion?? I also have a 2 year old DS [who gets up around 6am], so the more unbroken hours sleep the better!!!

[Samuel's mum]

At 8 weeks a lot of babies will still be waking every 3 hours (or even more often) during the night for a feed. I know it's rough but on the positive side this is helping to ensure a strong supply and good levels of the prolactin hormone that will help your milk supply in the long-term. Poo after a feed is a real hassle!! The pooing does get a lot less frequent quite soon - you never know you might even end up with only one a week!
7pm to 12.30am/1am is described by some as 'sleeping through'. That is an absolutely fantastic block. I guess an ideal scenario is you trying to sleep during that block too (yeah, right!). Even if you went to bed at 9ish and someone else could try and give a dream feed of expressed milk then you may find life easier to survive.
Dreamfeeds aren't the magic answer for everyone. Some people stop using them. You could experiment with cluster feeding before bedtime.

[CJF]

Roisin-I am going through the EXACT same scenerio here.  I have an 8 week old and he feeds around 7 and sleeps until 12:30-ish and then wakes about every 3 hours after that.  I haven't been doing a dream feed yet (I am not too sure what to do with a dream feed).  I tried last night around 10pm and he didn't want to eat at all, he just kept sleeping.  I would like to feed him then, too because he may do another 5 hour strech.  I am looking for some uninterupted sleep as well, I have a 2 year old, too. 
I posted my dream feed question in another post--so maybe we can get some answers there, too.
I hope we can find some answers together!!

[rosie and joe's mummy]

can i tell you what i did with rosie at 8 weeks re dream feeds?

what i did was express into a bottle as much as i could throughout the day. then at 10pm i would wake rosie fully (not the point of a dreamfeed but we'll get there in a minute!).  I'd breastfeed her until she seemed to stop and then i'd offer her the bottle, which she'd take more milk from. when she was really turnign away and definitely still awake (i wouldn't let her fall back asleep) then i put her down to sleep.

when she then woke up 3 hours later i gave her a paci (we've weaned off it now by 6 months so it's not a scary or bad thing to do!) and she went back to sleep. it was clear her waking was suck related not food related.

she'd then wake up at 4 am and i fed her again.

after a few days of this she stopped doing the first wakeup and so i started to offer the paci at the second. of course if she'd been unsettled i'd have fed her, but she wasn't she would go back to sleep.

it took about a week and suddenly she was taking 2 full breasts plus a couple of expressed ounces at 10-10.30pm and sleeping until 6 am!  bliss!

after another week i tried just offering the breasts and not expressed milk as well (I think a week of expressing made the milk production increase so it worked out the same).  and then after a few more days she didn't even wake up for the feed.

since then she's been picked up for a dreamfeed at 10.30 (oops got to go do that in a few minutes then!) and not woken until 6 (few blips though around weaning time, and when she's not been well but otherwise brilliant).

so i suppose the point is, dreamfeeds can work to ge tthem sleeping through the night, but you need a strategy to drop off the middle of the night feeds. simply giving a dreamfeed isn't always enough, if the other feeds are a habit then maybe you need to try and tackle that and see if your baby can do without them.

It worked for rosie, and another baby belonging to a friend, but i have another friend whose baby is now 5 months old and still needs at least one nightfeed. which is fine, it's just some babies can go all the way through pretty quickly. you won't know unless you try though!