The sleep saga so far

Little E has been what could fairly be described as a variable sleeper. At six weeks she was sleeping from 10:00pm to 4:00am and we were so impressed by this that we decided D should go back to work when she was seven weeks old rather than the planned 10 weeks, saving the rest of his long service leave for later.

At 13 weeks I gloated about the fact that she had repeatedly slept for 8.5 hours uninterrupted at night. At this stage, so long as she was wrapped up like a little caterpillar and had something interesting to stare at whilst dropping off, she would self settle without too much fuss.

Then at about four months came the great swaddling drama, combined by the move into her big cot and own bedroom.This heralded a return to night feeds and throughout this period we toyed with ditching the dummy. I think once we had eventually gotten rid of it, she was self settling during the day but often being fed to sleep at night, and certainly when she woke in the night as I was usually too tired and impatient to attempt anything else.

At about seven months E learned how to crawl and fairly rapidly how to pull herself up in her cot. She also became enormously clingy, screaming every time I walked out of her sight. Her ability to self settle evaporated and the only way I could get her to sleep at all, day or night, was feeding to sleep. She was waking up and getting fed once, and more often, twice, a night. At one stage D started going in to her the first time she woke up to see if she could be put back to sleep without milk. She could, but it was taking an hour or so at a time. We got lazy and went back to feeding to sleep. After a few weeks of this I persuaded E that rocking to sleep was okay (by her at least, I had doubts about the wisdom of starting it with a heavy little lump of a baby!) It was short lived and we were quickly back to feeding to sleep.

Over the last week or so, feeding to sleep has been less successful - E has either been waking up after 15 or 20 minutes, or just not falling asleep at all. At night she was invariably falling asleep whilst having her milk but then waking up after one sleep cycle or less, extremely angry. Yesterday I decided enough was enough and we would see if she could re-learn how to self settle. She didn't have a morning nap and by lunch time was good and tired. It took 35 minutes of screaming, but she did then sleep for 65 minutes.

At night she had her milk but did not fall asleep. She yelled for 20 minutes, then passed out. She did not wake up after one sleep cycle. D and I went to bed at about 9:00, not having heard a squeak out of her. She grizzled a little at about 11:00, but not enough that we got up. A bit after midnight she was properly awake. I went in, gave her a quick pat and said "it's still night time, sleep now, go back to sleep" and then left. She yelled furiously for 7 minutes, and that was it. At 5:30 we heard her talking to herself briefly but ignored her. At 6:45, D got up and had a shower. At 7:00am E was still out cold and we decided to wake her up, in the hope of reinforcing the idea that 7:00am is a good wake-up time. It was the first night since she was about four months old that she hasn't had a night feed.

This morning at about 10:00, after a lovely big play in the park, she put herself to sleep after 7 minutes of crying. I am feeling cautiously optimistic. At least, as Mum reminded me, until something changes again...

Image credit: http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/lka0012l.jpg