9 Month old with sleep disruptions
| Q: | My name is Sharon, first time mom. Our baby girl Zoe just turned 9 months on the 21st Feb. I can't believe that in 3 months she will be 1 year old. What I also can't believe is that I'm still Breast Feeding. Me being a first time Mom, I've done everything wrong right from the word go. I wish now I had read baby Sense say two weeks before I had Zoe and not 4 months after having her. Where do I start : Since Zoe was two weeks old up until coming back from our holidays in December just gone I have Co-Slept with her. I would put her in our bed, breast feed her until she fell asleep and then would leave the bedroom and whenever she woke up I was there like a flash, just slipping my nipple into her mouth for the next feed. I have since read baby Sense and I bought Sleep Sense. We are on solids but I don’t know if she eats enough. Some mornings we might just get half way through our porridge, mid morning I make her toast, that she seems to love, lunch I warm her some baby Spaghetti Bolognaise, she seems to love that but still doesn’t finish the jar, mid afternoon snack rice cakes with yoghurt covering. In the evening I give night time porridge and we always finish the whole bowl off. I read in Sleep Sense that what Zoe was doing to me waking up so often in the night was not necessarily because we were hungry, more just because it was a habit, so after our holiday, my husband and I bought a cot off a friend, bought some nice calm blankets and decided on that day that she was now going to sleep in her own bed and that she wasn’t going to have a feed until 2am if necessary. Zoe is 9 months, 75cm in length, just a bit over 9 kilo. We just started this week to crawl properly so maybe now because we are crawling, we might burn more energy, therefore building up more of an appetite, therefore maybe she will be sleeping better at night. We don’t take a dummy, never has to this day. The blanket that I’ve kept and kept and kept near her all the time, we just don’t use it, she throws it to the side when I leave it between her hands while I breast feed. Her feeds at the moment are 8am, 1pm, 6:30pm and then either 2am or 3am, sometimes 1am in the morning, depending on how strong I am. My reason for the email is that I'm battling to show Zoe how to self sooth herself. Every now and then when I put her to sleep at 6:30pm she will sleep until 12, or 1 maybe 1:45am before we stir but not often.Lately we wake up on the hour every hour and it is tiring. During the day we get 2 - 3 hours sleep plus a lot of Austrian fresh air!!! What can I do to show Zoe how to sooth herself to sleep again plus I would like to get her off the boob now as we like to bite more often nowadays. We have 6 teeth. look forward to your reply Sharon from Austria |
| A: | Dear Sharon
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