Inspired by the cosleeping thread, here is my burning question of the day.
Our 5 month-old baby has been sleeping from 10.30 pm to about 7 am for a long time now (yay! choirs of rejoicing…). I put her to bed at 8 and wake her up for a nurse before we go to bed. She has also started solids and eats cereal (but nothing else yet).
For the life of me, I can’t remember when our older daughter started sleeping from 8 to 7, all night long. I remember the battle to get her to quit waking up at 5 for a nurse, but not whether she was sleeping through from 8 pm onwards at that time.
I can’t find anything about it from Babycenter or my books; they all talk about ‘sleeping through the night,’ but they mean 8 hours, not longer.
So when does a kid quit needing night feedings at all? What did your kids do? I can’t figure out when my kid will be ready for that, but I get the feeling that she’s nearly there now.
My oldest’s first all-nighter was when she put together two 6-hour sleeps, snoozing away for 12 straight hours. She was only a couple of months old.
My younger did not sleep through the night without waking at least once until she was two! That’s two YEARS. By that time, as our pediatrician explained, she did not need to be fed in the middle of the night at all, she was simply bored and in a bad habit. Getting her out of that bad habit took an excruciating 3 nights of NOT going to get her when she woke and cried.
One thing I learned was that just because child #1 does something has nothing to do with whether subsequent children do it. There is no promise that what worked the first time will work the second time.
The best advice I can give you is to simply do what you’re doing – pay attention to what the child seems to want and need. I’d say that the current schedule you’ve got is pretty darn good. Some night maybe she won’t seem that interested in the 10:30 feeding and you could try skipping it, but if that results in her waking up at 4 a.m., obviously go back to the previous practice.
Good luck – you’ll do just fine. Don’t worry too much about what’s in the books and what people say is “normal.” or “average.”
Your daughter may have Narcohistoplasmosis which is usually incurable and fatal. Call your doctor immediately!
Just kidding.
My first child didn’t sleep through the night for months. His usual routine was to scream for four hours, sleep for twenty minutes and then repeat the cycle. (What a coincidence that I started finding gray hairs in my beard around that time.)
My second child fell asleep on the warming table in the delivery room and he’s rarely been awake since. He’s three months old now and the doctor says he’s a happy, healthy boy. Nothing to worry about.
First son was an excellent sleeper and napper. He still is, can hardly get him up for Christmas morning, much less school or anything else. He’s almost 16 now.
Second son had “colic”, which in his case meant all screams, no sleep. He was about 6 months old before he started being a sort-of reliable sleeper, but even then any small rupture in his routine could mean he’d wake up in the middle of the night. Not to feed, necessarily, just for comfort. IIRC, he was two or three before that petered out. He still has night terrors, and talks/whispers/thrashes in his sleep. He’s 13 now.
They’re all different, so who knows. But, you did manage to get one kid on a schedule, have faith that the other one will get there too.
There is little current (read, reliable relatively non-biased) research on normal infant sleep when breastfeeding or on when it is normal for any baby to sleep at night. The research is currently ongoing. However, what I have been able to find is that 60% of children 1 year of age wake up at least once each night (sufficient to require parental intervention), and that’s in a “parent’s idea of what is a night” rather than the medical ‘6-8 hours equals sleeping-through’ scenario. Of those who wake at least once, 1/3 wake three or more times.
That’s just ‘what is’ - it doesn’t say whether it is normal. There are a few sleep centers that are looking at establishing what is actually functionally normal, using sleep labs to assess the patterns when cosleeping, not-cosleeping, with night-nursing, with not night-nursing but breastfeeding, with not breastfeeding, etc. However, it will probably be years before enough data exists to give an accurate picture of what ‘should’ be happening at night. In the meantime, your baby is the book on itself. If your baby seems ready to drop the night nursing, then your baby may well be ready. If you try it and it works, they were ready. If you try it and it is a disaster, then they weren’t ready, or need another/different method, so try something else or try again later.
JMHO (speaking as mom of one who night nursed past three years, but still woke at night for another 9 months past that, and one who was stacking up the 6+ hour sleeps at 6 weeks, and now rarely wakes more than once a night at almost two.)