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Night feeding

  1. #1
    AG2007 is offline Registered User
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    Night feeding

    My baby is 4 months and still feeds every 2-3hrs during the early hours (ie from midnight to 7am). Upon reading Gina Ford, she teaches to give baby water or settle in means other than breastfeeding so baby will eventually get the message that he/she will not get any breast milk and therefore will start sleeping thru.

    Guess my question is, are there any mothers out there who continued to feed their babies every 2-3hrs and eventually slept thru at some point, or is it necessary to "train" baby?


  2. #2
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    carang is offline Registered User
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    i continued and still continue if she wakes up. she's now 8 months old....for a few weeks there she was back to waking up every 3 hours, but has settled herself down again and wakes once for about 10 minutes. i started givign her formula at 6 months but before that she was exclusively bf.

    good luck. go with your instinct. YOU are the mother. your baby hasn't read the book, so doesn't know she is supposed to be following a rigid schedule...


  3. #3
    Neha is offline Banned
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    our baby is 10 months and still gets up once a night. he drinks only 3-4 oz before sleeping ar 7.00 so he is hungry in middle. hope he will start sleeping thru once he starts eating more solids


  4. #4
    mintycat is offline Registered User
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    My baby is 4 months and she 'slept through' at about 3 months when she cut the 3 am feed herself. We are exclusively BF here but I dreamfeed her at about 12 am with a bottle of breastmilk (5 oz) and she can last til 7 am. I follow Gina Ford's schedule too but I tweak it such after the 6 pm feed, I tank her up at about 9 pm again (also a dreamfeed).

    I agree with folllowing your instinct. I didn't really train my daughter and I fed on demand in the first few months before she sort of fell into this schedule recently, which I introduced gently.


  5. #5
    AG2007 is offline Registered User
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    Thanks everyone. I was just worried that if I continued to b/f her every 2hours in the middle of the night she will continue to expect this. It would be nice if she eventually learnt to sleep for longer stretches (I'm not even expecting her to sleep thru the night!)


  6. #6
    JennyB is offline Registered User
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    Sounds like you are keen to hear of some light at the end of the tunnel without following the strict Ford schedule! But what other people's babies do, or don't do, does not have any direct relationship with what your baby will do - they are all so different. My babies started to sleep for longer stretches at an earlier stage than yours, but who knows what the reasons for the difference are.

    One thing that most parents find is that the babies gradually go into a deeper sleep as they get older, and that seems to be a natural physiological thing. I forgot to put my 15 month old's pyjama bottoms on last night and was worried about her legs getting cold (she sleeps without bedding in the summer), so I sneaked in and managed to put them on her without waking her -to my great surprise! She has obviously learned to sleep more deeply lately.

    You sound concerned that you are not doing things which contribute to your baby waking. I think babies' natures are so different, and the difficult ones will grow out of it eventually. It's a question of how desperate you are for change. The only things I would advise are to *sometimes* let your baby fall asleep in other ways than breastfeeding for *daytime* sleeps, and don't always run to her the moment she makes a sound. Sometimes they are just whimpering while they roll over and can go back to sleep by themselves. My baby sleeps much better when I forget to put the monitor on! (I can still hear her if she is very upset.)

    Make sure you take naps or go to bed early while you have such broken sleep. Good luck for that longer stretch happening soon!


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