Hi,
Thanks for your reply. We've observed the situation for another month, including on vacation (i.e. mummy doesn't go to work for a few days) and I've read through the reverse cycling again. We'd decided to tackle weight/intake first, sleep later.
- firstly, things are getting better with weight and intake, he's now steadily on the same percentile (25-30 or so; depends on which tables they use as here in Singapore they randomly use WHO or their own tables which I believe are tuned on Asian babies). When mummy goes to work, after the morning breastfeed he gets 3 times 2.5 to 3.5 oz solid and twice 6-7 oz of expressed milk. So it doesn't look like he doesn't want to get food if mummy is not around. During the last few days on vacation he had even more appetite for solids, up to 4 oz each time
- on your question how he gets to sleep during the day - our helper would wait for signs of tiredness and walk him to sleep. She'd put him down either drowsy or sleeping, which usually works at the first shot. As you may imagine training a helper to do PUPD or other techniques is at best very difficult, as she has other chores to do and is not as vested in the child's development as a parent. So I am not sure starting PUPD during the day is an option now
- when he's on vacation, during the day he either falls asleep with motion (in ergobaby for example) or at breast. At night he wants the breast to fall asleep, usually still sucks vigorously most of the time. Every time he cries my wife would wait 1-2 minutes, walk into the room and pat him on the back/on the thigh. If nothing happens for 1-2 minutes, she'd pick him up. If he still cries after 1-2 minutes, she'd give him the breast. If I walk into the room I don't succeed in settling him down with any of these techniques, he just cries louder and longer except very rare occasions (like once in 3 months) when I walked him to sleep for 30 minutes bearing with the cry because mummy wasn't available. On the rare occasions when he is left with our helper in the evening, the helper reports that it is quite hard to put him back to bed without crying including by giving him the bottle.
- night pattern is roughly the same, sometimes with longer stretches (6 hours). He's teethed 4 incisive, didn't change the wakings at all except perhaps one night. It looks like teething doesn't really bother him
So with that we're back to the questions on PUPD. As I mentioned the whole logic of PUPD seems to be that the baby settles when reassured or picked up; if not at the first attempt, at some point. We have the impression that our baby never settles and continues to cry if we reassure him or pick him up , so how would PUPD work? Wouldn't it be equivalent to CIO if the baby never settles? Are we supposed to let him cry unendlessly while picking him up and putting him down, no matter how hard he cries? Have you had any experience/success with teaching babies how to get themselves to sleep in these situations?
Thanks - you're doing an awesome job!