I feel like I have been working on trying to get Anna to sleep through the night for forever without much progress. I read all the books I could find at the library and at Borders and none of them seemed to have information that would help me with Anna. Part of this problem is that Anna is a good sleeper. She goes to bed fine and she takes great naps – she just wasn’t sleeping through the night for some reason. I had even tried slowly weaning her like the books said but she would still wake up. We even tried letting her “cry it out” but she just cried and cried and then woke of 1 hour later crying again. She was acting like she really needed the food to sustain her in order to make it through the night.
Well my mom bought me another book. Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber. (My reaction was: “Mom, I have already read EVERYTHING!”) Well I was wrong – this book was great. It had similar stuff, such as making sure that your child can fall asleep on her own (check), and slowly weaning them off eating at night (tried but not yet succeeded) but it had something else as well. He wrote all about the different sleep cycles and that information was very helpful.
For one thing, I realized that Anna was currently suffering from having a “late sleep cycle”. This means that she was getting fussy earlier then normal but then falling asleep a lot later than normal. This had happened because we had had family in town and stayed out later than normal doing things a couple of nights and Anna had gone to bed late. So now she was having trouble falling asleep at her normal time. Thankfully this was easy to fix. I did two things he suggested. I woke Anna up at her normal time each morning, and I put her to bed 15 minutes earlier each day. After three days she was back to normal.
That was the short-term problem I had to fix, then came addressing the long-term problem of not sleeping through the night. After reading the book I realized that Anna was having a hard time distinguishing between night sleep and nap sleep. She would go to bed for the night and then I would feed her again at around 10:30 to hopefully help her tummy be full for the night. This was the problem. Her body was getting used to waking up after only a few hours of sleep (just like at nap time) instead of going into deeper sleep. And then she would wake up every few hours, and when she did she would be hungry. This was a lot easier to fix then I realized. I needed to wean her off that feeding.
The first night I fed her at 10:30 but shortened the feeding. S than woke up at 4:30-5ish and I fed her for 1 minute. Then she slept until 8:00.
The second night I delayed the feeding until 12:30 and only let her eat a few minutes. She than slept until 7:30.
The third night I did not wake her up at all. She woke at 5:00 and I fed her for 1 minute and then she slept until 8:00. (That means she slept 10 hours straight!)
The fourth night she slept from 7:30 until 7:30 or 8:00!
She has been sleeping all night since then. We have had interruptions with teeth hurting or a fever but each time it was one interruption in the night and the following night she slept just fine. So I needed to do two things to get her to sleep all night. First, shorten each feeding, and second, lengthen the time between each feeding. Now she is happily sleeping through the night.
Living. Learning. Creating. 