My LO is 7 months. We started babywhisperer routine at 3 weeks old. By 6 weeks, LO was on a great routine. He has been able to self sooth himself to sleep since then--we rarely have any problems going to sleep, and it is even more rare that we have a night waking.
Our routine:
Wake and breastfeed: 7:30
8:30: solids
10:30: nap
12:30: wake bf
1:30; solids
3:30: nap
5:00 wake and bf
6:00: solids
7:30 or 8:00: bedtime
Our routine has always looked similar to this with 1.5 to 2 hour naps during the day. In the past we have had a 30-45 min. catnap in the evenings. I still do the catnap if for some reason he can't make 3 hours of awake time and ends up having too much time between second nap and bedtime. Every once in awhile, he'll wake at 3 or 4 and need to eat. It lasts about 2 days and then he goes back to normal, so I attribute it to a growth spurt.
DST was a huge struggle. My creature of habit started getting up at 6:30 instead of 7:30. It took a week of w2s to fix him. Instead of the regular w2s, I fed him when I woke him in order to make sure that when he woke at 6:30, he wasn’t too hungry to go back to sleep. Right after I fixed the nw, LO got h1n1. I pretty much bf him around the clock because we cut all the solids and I wanted to make sure he was getting enough fluids. Because of the fever, he was waking up every 2-3 hours at night. I fed him every time in order to comfort him and keep his fluids up. He also learned to crawl during his bout of the swine flu.
Now he is all better and acting normal, but has been having night wakings where he cries and won't resettle himself. He normally wakes during the night, but he makes a few grunting noises, whines and falls right back to sleep. In the past few nights I have just fed him to see if he was just going through a growth spurt, but I don’t think that’s it. I don’t know why he is waking. Last night he woke at 11, which is when I was going to df him anyway. Then he woke up at 1:00, so I fed him, but he didn’t eat much. Then he woke up at 2 and took a full feeding. Then he slept until 7:30.
Prior to dst, we had almost cut out the dreamfeed. Most of the nights he didn’t need it, but sometimes he’d wake at 3 or 4. Does a 7 ½ month old need the dreamfeed? Is he actually hungry when he wakes at night?
My plan:
Dreamfeed at 11. Spend as long as it takes patting and soothing when he wakes in the middle of the night, but I will not feed him. I haven’t done this yet because I’ve been so tired due to getting no sleep while helping him adjust to dst, plus I had the flu too. Tonight I can give it my all because dh can get up at 7:30 with LO.
Any thoughts?
