This kind of crosses over between Eat and Sleep, but since my main question is about the feed, I'm posting here. Hope that's alright!
And as a second edit to this post, we EBF and he gets expressed milk at the dream feed.
So here's some back story: My six month old began sleeping through the night fairly early - around 2.5 months. His usual night was 11-12 hours with a dream feed at 10:30. Occasionally we would go through a phase where his sleep would be disrupted, but most of the time he was fairly easy to resettle, and eventually, things would go back to normal after a week or two...or three
But, for the last few weeks, he's been waking early (anywhere between 5 and 6, when he used to wake at 7 or 7:30), and it's nearly impossible to get him back to sleep. It can take an hour or two of drifting off and waking again before he'll stay asleep. And even then, I might only get an extra 45 minutes out of him. I've tried waiting longer to see if he'll settle, going in sooner to catch him before he wakes too much, nursing him, leaving the room as soon as he settles, staying until he seems good and asleep...nothing seems to make the slightest difference. And the problem is, if I allow him to start his day that early, he's horribly cranky (as am I!), and it's impossible to make it to bed time.
I know that there are a LOT of things that could be contributing to this. For one thing, he used to be a horrible napper, and now a full hour and a half is the norm. On top of that, he's working on sitting and crawling, might be teething, and I believe he's ready to eliminate the cat nap, so we're trying to slowly extend awake time from 2 1/2 hrs to 3. But I'm also beginning to question whether or not he's ready to drop the dream feed. He began to wake up for the dream feed some nights, or at least begin to stir as soon as I walked in the room. But very suddenly, he stopped doing that about a week and a half ago. Now he's still out cold when I go in, and only takes 3 ounces when he used to take at least 5. Logically, I can't think of a reason why the dream feed would be disrupting his sleep since he's not waking until hours after it's done, but my gut keeps telling me to consider it. I was planning on phasing it out once we finished eliminating the cat nap (one change at a time), but now I'm wondering if it might be beneficial to try it now. Especially since we're having issues anyway, it's not like there's any risk in disturbing what would be peaceful nights.
Anyway, now that I've babbled long enough, I'm just wondering if there's any out there who suspected the dream feed was disrupting their baby's sleep and dropped it cold turkey. And if so, how did it go??
