Not sure what to do with 7 month old

[mom2mikayla]

Mikayla will be 7 months old on Oct. 8. I now realize I made a huge mistake when she was first born by always feeding her to sleep. I bought The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems book and have been working hard to get her on the 4 hour schedule. She seems to do best if she has 3 naps a day. Here are the issues now:

1. She doesn't want to eat at 7am, 11am, 3pm and 7pm. She wants to eat at 5am, 9am (supposed to be naptime), 1pm (again, naptime), 5pm and 9pm and 3am. I try to feed her at the above times, but she just snacks a little and then won't go to sleep without more food...and that brings me to my next issue.

2. She wakes up several times in the night. I don't feed her until after midnight at least, but she really does seem hungry at 3am. She routes and tries to latch onto my chin...when I feed her, she eats for about 20 minutes.

3. I have tried PU/PD and I must be doing something wrong. I put her in her crib and she's pretty happy. When I walk away from the crib, she starts to fuss. When I go back into her sight, she coos happily again. This seems to go on forever! If I leave for a longer period of time, she gets worked up and when I go back and pick her up, she calms right down and I put her down in her crib and she starts crying immediately again. So I pick her up and reassure her and when I put her back down, she wants to play again...

So I guess in summary, I have a little one who won't go to sleep on her own and won't stay asleep when she gets there... :oops:

Edited to add: is it ok to swaddle her still? Sometimes it calms her down and gets her to fall asleep....

Any suggestions?!!  TIA!


Sheri

[lil'monkey]

Hi Sheri,

Welcome to the board!  Great name for your lo by the way!!! :wink:

It is great that you have the third book.  I learned a lot from it but...I also learned that every baby is different in eating/sleeping habits and not to expect them to follow the book exactly.  This board is great as it really helps me understand my dd and use the suggestions from the book and from other bw moms to make our days run smoothly.  Here are some suggestions...

1.  It is OK to have an AES routine instead of EAS.  Just make sure that your dd is not falling asleep while nursing.  You can do several things to wake her if she does fall asleep.  Diaper change, read a short story, wipe face with cold facecloth, sit her up, etc.  Our routine was AES from birth till about 5 mos.  Then SHE decided to change it to EAS.   I just try to follow her hunger cues.  If you really want EAS then what you could do is slowly decrease the amount at 5 am and start your official morning feed at 7 am and go from there.  There will be crying as your dd will want to resist this change.

2.  If she really is hungry then you need to feed her.  What you want to do is increase her caloric intake during the day or try the dreamfeed.  With the dreamfeed, it can take about a week to see any result.  In the meantime, you can do pat/shh, pu/pd, paci or whatever method to get her back to sleep.  We did the df, but I found that it didn't make dd sleep any longer.  Ironically, it was when we stopped the df at 5 mos that dd slept 10-11 hrs.  I would try to increase the caloric intake by adding an extra feeding (nursing or solids) or just increase the time you nurse her.

3.  I'm not an expert with PU/PD as dd gets tooo hysteria (b/c her temperment, we did something else), so I can't offer any suggestions.   There is a forum on pu/pd.  You should try going there to gets some suggestions regarding it.

If getting swaddled calms her down for sleep, then I would continue with it.  DD was in an Aussie swaddle til she was able to get out of it at around 7 mos.  I stopped swaddling her but I found that she had already associated sleep with the motion of getting wrapped.  So now, I just loosely wrap her torso as part of the wind down.


HTH

[mlhy]

Sheri-
I'd have to agree with mimi that it's okay to not do the exact times tracy  hogg recommends. It's okay to have the nursing times move around in there as long as they are around 4 hours apart and that you aren't nursing to sleep. Nursing near sleep times is no big deal since that's recommended in book 3 near bedtime anyway.

Also, the dream feed didn't help us either. If I just let my little lady wake up on her own she either wakes up at 1-2 for a full feed, or at 10 and 3 for half feeds. I can't get her to take more on those days so I stopped fighting it.

You are doing good work, and trust yourself. The whole point of the babywhisperer was just to make life a little easier for you, and when I freak out and try to get my little lady on those exact hour marks I have to remind myself of that.

Keep up the good work! Also with swaddling, once our little one could bust out of the arms (she didn't like the aussie swaddling) it took about a week of weaning her to where she could sleep with both arms out (well maybe a week with one arm, and then a week or two with both arms out). Initially she'd wake up several times a night and when we heard her stirring one of us would go and gently but firmly hold her arm (with a blankie over it as tracy suggests) to help her relax back to sleep.

best wishes,
marni