Troubleshooting sleep - Getting better!

Mara is becoming a better sleeper!

On Valentine's day she gave mommy a great gift: a 5h stretch of sleep till after midnight! That is textbook "sleep through the night". It happened after two days of fever, so it's probably the deep healing sleep after you're sick, but we all benefited from it. Happy Mommy Day!

Since then, we've been so lucky to get several two-hour cycles every single night! Usually two before midnight, one till around 2-3am and one from 4-6am.
The only major feedings are at midnight and 3-4am, the rest of the time she is just trying to figure out sleep.

What had changed?

Step 1

We had done 3h daytime feedings as per our pediatrician's advice. It didn't do anything at all for over two weeks, other than making a slightly crankier baby.

Step 2

Another piece of advice was that she might not be getting enough milk right before bedtime, so we did pumping 1h after every feeding, paired with the nursing tincture from Herblore (thank you, Dorina and Kayle for recommending this to us!). We got over 5oz of milk in addition to the usual nursing session before bedtime.

That, my friends, is a LOT of milk!

The night of the experiment, Mara was ecstatic! She took on the challenge very seriously, grabbed the Tommee Tippee bottle with both hands and kicked daddy away - she's got this!

She chugged the first 3oz till she couldn't breathe anymore, and had to cough a few times. She still went at it, finished every drop. At this point though, the last few mouthfuls were literally over the limit: there was no more room for the milk to go in the tummy, so it was spilling from the corner of her mouth over her jammies at every suckle.

We figured we'd give her a break, held her upright and let her wiggle for 20 minutes, then we presented the second bottle, the last two ounces of the five.

She tried really hard.

She was a happy milk balloon, ready to burst.

She passed out very content with the fullest belly she'd ever had. One hour later, she woke. The night continued on with the usual schedule of waking every hour.

So it wasn't that she was hungry in the evenings.

Step 3

The next thing that was on our list of causes was the reverse feeding schedule (thank you, Kellyn, for pointing that out!). This means she could have gotten used to feeding a lot at night, which freed up her daytime for snacks and fun. 

Luckily, this goes hand in hand with the previous things we had tried this month: after all the pumping to get extra milk, mommy's supply went up. We reverted to on-demand feedings which made Mara take all that milk in the daytime.

She had her daily fuel already provided, so this time no excuse to keep munching at night.

After a few days of this, she started waking as usual but refusing to nurse to go back to sleep. She was content and wanted either cuddles or wiggles or to be walked around a bit, several times a night. This time, mommy could do the holding/rocking just fine because Mara couldn't care less about feeding.

We were on the right path.

Step 4

The last piece of the puzzle was in sight all along, but we hadn't solved it yet. At night, quite often, Mara was getting overheated. It was only her back, hot after every hour when I would pick her up. We had varied the temperature in the room till she was cold and woke up from that every 20 minutes. That didn't help, her head and face and limbs were cold but her back always hot.

She would now fall asleep again if I just picked her up and laid her back on a different part of the bed that was not heated yet. Instant sleep.

We had previously tried varying nighttime clothing, sleep locations, and bed coverings, yet no change.

Finally, the week of Feb 20th Mara started being able to comfortably move around in the bed. I would wake up to find her stir, but stay asleep as she just turned on her side or even drowsily getting up on tummy time and collapsing soon after into slumber. No real mommy intervention needed some of the times. Yay!

That week Mara put herself back to sleep more often in three nights than the last two months combined.

This past week we've had 4 nights of 4-5h stretches from 8-9pm till around 2-3am, followed by lengthy episodes in early morning hours. Needless to say, mommy is ecstatic!

We'll see how this progresses, but we're realizing we're just getting to know our child. She's growing up and slowly learning how to deal with everything in her own.

We just need to let her do it and help her along.