| Hi Bailey
Jane01 is spot on with her advice but I just thought I'd reply as my son is also 5 months and has gone from waking several times a night to sleeping through until 6am in the last two weeks.
He started waking three times in the night about three weeks ago, but wasn't really interested in a feed and would go back to sleep so quickly on my breast that I decided to leave him to grumble and see if he would settle himself. After three nights he wasn't waking up at all.
Now I don't even wake him for a feed before I go to bed, but he will sometimes wake up around 10pm for a five minute top up. I've started giving him rice cereal at 5pm, but he's not really interested so it seems that for now my breast milk is enough. This was a surprise for me as I was giving my daughter a big bottle of formula at 6pm, and she was much smaller than Finlay!
My experience with controlled crying is that my husband has to literally pin me down on the bed to stop me from going to the baby, and our rule is that we won't let him cry for more that 10 minutes without going in to pick him up. If that settles him then we put him down again for another ten minutes. We've never had to do this more than three times before he goes off to sleep.
I hope this helps to reassure you that you should be getting a full night's sleep before too long! I know we are extremely lucky and of course all babies are different, but yours is certainly doing what we would expect of a healthy 5 month old.
Good luck!  |