Dream feeding - baby way off schedule.

[josephfc]

Hello. I recently introduced a dream feed with my 11 week old son. He had been going 7am 230-3am 630-7am. He got a bit off schedule waking at all kinds of times and purely by accident he had a feed at 1130pm one night and slept until 630!

Anyway I decided tonintroduce a dreamfeed wondering if we could maintain this. However he is now waking at all kinds of times. If he wakes at 530 I feed and settle him back down until 8am. But if he wakes at 630 it's too close to wake up time to do this.

Also the days when he does settle down until 8am (which I thought was great) he still has a total meltdown from 5pm (even if I nap him for an hour at 4pm he wakes at 5 screaming until bedtime). This was acceptable when bed was 645. But since he's sleeping later bedtime is now also later for him, between 730 and 8pm - he won't nod off any earlier). Yet his witching hour still starts at 5pm. And all we've achieved with the df is a 530 or 630 feed and we end up in limbo.

We've been doing this for 4 days and I don't know whether to stick to it and hope he sleeps until 7am soon and I can get him back on track or drop it.

Has anyone else had similar problems and how did you deal with it? Any suggestions on how to head off the 5pm tantrum before it starts? We have difficult with naps all day, if we're kicky he will nap for 45 minutes every 1.5-2 hours.

Confused! Also, to add to the confusion, he's clearly off track because of the clock change too so it was a surprise he slept until 8am some days!

[becj86]

However he is now waking at all kinds of times. If he wakes at 530 I feed and settle him back down until 8am. But if he wakes at 630 it's too close to wake up time to do this.

This is pretty normal variation in wake times at this stage.

Frankly, I never found the DF worked for us, so we didn't keep it. Its ok to not keep it too It is best to give it a week to settle down and see if its working though.

What is his A time at the moment? Wondering if its a touch too high and he's overtired? Can you resettle him after a short nap?

[AJK]

Hi there,
I am recently in a similar boat to you. My son is 3 months and I introduced the dreamfeed about 6 days ago because he was sleeping from 730pm-12, waking at 3am, and then 7am again to start the day. It was great, though I wanted to see if it here possible to change his pattern so his long stretch of sleep was 10pm-3am so it corresponded with my sleep so that when I woke to start the day I wasn't as tired.
Well, since introducing the dream feed at 1030pm, he now wakes at 1am and 5am and I too have trouble getting his to feed at 7am in the morning. What I have started to do is to feed him one breast at 5am and try to get him back down so that at 7am he is still hungry, rather than feed him a full feed and him not be hungry until 8am which then seems to throw his routine off.

I am wondering if I should drop the dream feed too because it seems he sleeps the same amount, but I feed him more. I wonder if he would have naturally just dropped the midnight feed when he was ready? He's really doing well either way, and I managed on the sleep I get, but I have two friends who followed the baby whisperer routine that said their little guys did the 10-1030 dream feed, then woke at 1am and 5am which eventually morphed into one 3am feed and now they are four months and have dropped the 3am all together so they sleep from 7-7 with only one feed at 1030.

Who knows.... any luck since your post?

AJK

[becj86]

I wonder if he would have naturally just dropped the midnight feed when he was ready?

My son just pushed his feeds out of his own accord to sleep 6-6 or 7-7 from about 6 months. I didn't do the DF because it didn't buy me more sleep, I had to stay up to do it... I did try it at one stage to see if I could push a feed from 5/5:30 through to 7am but that resulted in loads of extra wakings, so I dropped it again.

[AJK]

Good to know. I guess I'll try it for a bit longer since I'm usually awake until 9ish anyway, so it's only another hour. If it doesn't change then I'll just drop it and let him figure it out naturally. Thanks for letting me know what worked for you.