Probably the #1 question I get about my baby and a source of anxiety for me honestly as most of the time I answered..."Sometimes"...
It's a mommy mark of pride when baby snoozes away for 5, 6, 10 hours straight it seems. But, it's also something I feel like you have very little control over. I'd heard how sleep deprived parents of newborns are, I assumed that lasted a month at best, maybe two...but here we are inching closer to four months and I'm still tired!
I read all the books with schedules and advice. I bought these books on amazon prime usually at 3am when I was at my wits end...someone SOMEONE must know how to get a baby to sleep more than 3 hours in a row, right? I listened to his pediatrician who said stuff him full of milk during the day. He also told me not to hold my breath for a full night sleep since babes is still small weight wise and that I probably wouldn't catch any relief until Carter hit 14+ pounds.
The piece of advice most of the books and blogs swore by was the "Dream Feed". It's a feeding you do right before you go to bed around 10:30 or 11pm. I have been doing it for about 2 months now. "Before I go to bed" is a subjective term...I cannot go to bed at 10:30pm because I'm so exhausted there's no way I could just stay up until then anyways. I try to go down at 8:30 or 9 when the baby goes down. Then I set an alarm and drag myself out of bed to dream feed the baby at 11pm and pray it lasts him until 2 or 3am when he'd wake up and need to eat again.
Did I mention how sleepy I am? How miserable having an alarm go off at 11pm is after I just fell asleep? How tired I am of being tired?
Ok, now that I got that out of my system...
So last week I dropped the dream feed. I was tired of it. It wasn't helping him sleep through the night anyways, he was still waking. I figured I'd let him wake me up when he was hungry, whenever that might be during the night. He's old enough to do that now.
And wouldn't you know...
That little bugger has started sleeping through the night most nights.
9pm until 5 or 6am.
Go figure.
