Teach Your Baby to Sleep, Part II

I can't tell you the number of emails I've gotten about my post, Teach Your Baby to Sleep. None of them were hate mail either. Isn't that shocking! They were either in support of teaching babies to sleep or from women wanting to know more about how to do it. I don't really know enough to be handing out advice (not that that has ever stopped me before). All I can do is tell you what has worked for me. If you want more information I suggest you start reading every book you can find on the subject and then do something completely different than everything you've read because that's basically how I do things. I read and then make up a system that works for me and my family.

In my post Teach Your Baby to Sleep I talked about waking your baby up during the day to feed her so she gets enough to eat and she doesn't need to wake up at night to eat. I can only add a few more things to that.

One is what I've heard people call Cluster Feeding. Babies tend to get fussy in the everning and they want to nurse more. Sweetness for example will nurse every hour from six or seven o'clock on until she finally goes to sleep for the night. I think this helps her stock up for the night and I think it also helps with my milk production.

Here is another trick you can try. Sneak your baby out of bed and nurse her one last time before you go to bed. Last night Sweetness nursed at 9:00 and then went to bed. Instead of wisely going to bed myself I stayed up to eat popcorn with my older kids. Sleep or popcorn? It was a difficult choice. At midnight, before I went to bed, I got Sweetness up to nurse her. I opened her mouth and put her on my breast without waking her up. If you're lucky your baby will nurse instead of turning her head and scrunching her eyebrows in sleepy disgust. What can I say? Sometimes it works and sometimes you just plain get rejected. I try not to take it personally! When it works though it's great because they get an extra feeding while you're still up.

Another key to a well rested baby is that they learn to put themselves to sleep themselves (As my three year old would say, "Mommy, I buckled myself myself!). That means I don't nurse my babies to sleep or use a pacifier or even rock them to sleep. I will rock my baby till she is calm enough to fall asleep on her own but I find that if I put her down after she is already asleep then she doesn't stay asleep. If she falls asleep on her own then she stays asleep and sleeps longer.

So how do I teach her to fall asleep on her own? I am not a fan of any kind of CIO (cry it out) method with babies. I used CIO with my second baby because things went so horribly wrong with my first and I didn't know what else to do but I didn't like it. The third time around I discovered a method that didn't involve any crying and I didn't feel like I was heartlessly abandoning my baby.

What I do is put my baby to bed warm and sleepy and happy. When she starts to fuss I pick her up and hold or rock her until she is happy and then put her down again. She fusses, I pick her up, calm her and put her down. Rinse, lather, repeat. In the beginning I might do this several times. Eventually she gives up and goes to sleep. She is four weeks old now and most of the time she goes to sleep the first time I put her down. She might even "play" in her crib for several minutes but then eventually she falls asleep. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. My older kids still like time to read or relax in bed and so do I! I can always hear my three year old in her bed after I tuck her in, talking and playing until she falls asleep.

One thing to rememeber is that tiny babies can only stay awake for an hour or so at a time. If I have fed and changed my baby and she if fussy then it is time for her to go back to bed. If I wait too long she will get overtired and have a very difficult time going to sleep.

Please never make a hungry baby wait to eat according to a clock or schedule. I don't let my baby snack and nurse all day long but if my baby is hungry I feed her. The only reason I look at the clock is so I can make sure she hasn't gone too long between feedings. I never use the clock to make her wait when she is hungry.

Stranger thinks I'm a wimp for closing the comments on my last post so I'm going to keep them open this time. Just remember that I'm posting MY OPINIONS, take them or leave them.

I may be editing this post if you have any questions that I forgot to answer.