This is the face of a baby who slept ALL night!!
We put Ayden to bed at 8:45 then gave him his dream feed around 10:30 when we went to bed. He woke at 3am for a feeding, again around 5:30am and then we were up for the day at around 8 or so. If you're counting, that's somewhere around 10 hours of sleep total!!
Now that doesn't mean that Mommy got that much sleep... We had a HUGE thunderstorm with bright, flashing lightning and thunder that shook the house. One thunder boom woke me at 1:30 and I unfortunately stayed awake until after his 3am feeding. I tried and tried to go back to sleep but all I could do was lay there and worry about 1) if the storm was going to wake and scare Ayden, 2) if the storm was going to take out our electricity preventing us from hearing him on the monitor and 3) that he would wake up right after I fell asleep anyway. Needless to say, I don't feel anymore rested than I do any other day but my spirits are up knowing that we may be getting somewhere with this sleep thing!
All I can say is that timing is everything (laying him down before he's over tired, preferably after his first yawn) and that dream feeding is where it's at! Our dream feed was only 3 ounces because that's all i got when i pumped right after I fed him. You are supposed to give half of their body weight in ounces. Ayden is somewhere between 11 and 12 pounds so ideally we would give him around 6 ounces or so for it to be a full feeding. I had read that some babies don't wake enough on the first few tries to take a whole dream feeding so I didn't worry about giving just 3 ounces. It was all an experiment last night anyway!
So once we were up and at 'em today, we had breakfast, put Ayden down for an hour long nap (!!) and got ready for the day. When he woke up, we headed out to the farmer's market to get some vegetable plants for our container garden.
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| Our big sleeper!! |
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| We thought that maybe the owners were CATS fans?? It was just a guess. The pic on the right shows that the dog had a wildcat on its side... |
Then it was Derby time!!
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| If you could see Ayden's onsie a little better, you'd see that his head is the head for the jockey. :) |
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| Pretty pooped after all of the visiting at the party... |
We finished the evening hanging out with our four favorite friends (the same friends that stayed late after David's birthday last weekend).
Ayden was SUCH a trooper all day! Probably thanks to all the sleep he had last night. He smiled and cooed at everyone as he was passed around and even showed off his new ability to roll over earlier in the day. It took 3 months but we're pretty sure he's decided that the world and all the strange people in it are pretty cool after all :).
Now it's after 11 and we're just now pulling into our neighborhood. I have no idea how tonight will go sleep wise because there has been absolutely nothing routine about it but I hope we have another good night because this mommy is EXHAUSTED!
~Sarah
Hi Sarah!
ReplyDeleteI have an 11 week old and I love reading your blog (typically at those 2 am feedings. Well it's 4:37 right now) :) I feel like we are going through some of the same things. Jack is so inconsistent at night. Sometimes every 3 hours, sometimes 2, tonight 5?!. What is this dream feeding? Do you wake to nurse at a late hour? Can't wait to read if tonight worked for you too!
Hi Abby!! I have the comment settings so that I have to approve all of the comments. I need to change that as it seems to make a lot of people think their comments don't post :). I learned about dream feeding when I read Secrets Of the Baby Whisperer. She says that a lot of parents tend to try to make their baby wait until their bedtime so that they can get as much sleep as possible while the baby is sleeping (this was totally us!). But in doing that the baby becomes over tired, is harder to put to sleep and doesn't sleep as well once asleep. Her secret here is to give a "dream feeding." You put the baby to bed when he/she is tired (preferably after the first yawn) and this is probably around 7:00 or 8:00 for most babies. Then, when you are ready to go to bed (probably between 9 and 10), you give a "dream feed" which is feeding them without waking them up at all. You can pick him up and breastfeed, or pump and do a bottle so as to disturb him even less, which is what I am going to start doing. It worked wonders for us! Let me know if you try and if it works for you too. The book warns that it may take a few tries for them to master eating in their sleep, so if it doesn't work the first night or two, keep trying! Good luck!
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