All about sleeping through the night..

I am wondering how many parents are like us, for the past half a year, the number one baby topic we key into search engines is always "baby sleeping through the night". I believe nighttime waking is one of the most common dilemmas for us parents.

I said goodbye to uninterrupted beauty sleep ever since Renzo was born. Though I have been trying extremely hard to establish a daily bedtime routine for Renzo, he was only doing relatively well during his 4th month. And by "relatively well", I meant only a good 4-5 hour sleep after his shower time. I would still have to carry and cuddle him to sleep after his midnight feed. Then the 5th and 6th months were just nightmares to me as I was overwhelmed with his occasional 7 - 9 times of wakeups, meaning I need to creep to his cot almost every hour at night (that's no joke because I really had to pick him up and rock him or feed him water before he could sleep back again). He had never ever slept through the night for the past 6 months+, not even a single night!

Look at our beautiful record on this little boy's sleeping pattern:
Month 00 (Aug 09)
- Longest sleep after shower: 3 hours+
- Number of feeds during midnight: 3
- Carry to sleep in wee hours: Yes

Month 01 (Sep 09)
- Longest sleep after shower: 3 hours+
- Number of feeds during midnight: 3
- Carry to sleep in wee hours: Yes

Month 02 (Oct 09)
- Longest sleep after shower: 3 hours+
- Number of feeds during midnight: 2
- Carry to sleep in wee hours: Yes

Month 03 (Nov 09)
- Longest sleep after shower: 4 hours+
- Number of feeds during midnight: 2
- Carry to sleep in wee hours: Yes

Month 04 (Dec 09)
- Longest sleep after shower: 4-5 hours+
- Number of feeds during midnight: 1
- Carry to sleep in wee hours: Yes

Month 05 (Jan 10)
- Longest sleep after shower: 6-8 hours+
- Number of feeds during midnight: 1 and down to 0 from Jan 13 onwards
- Carry to sleep in wee hours: Stopped from Jan 04 onwards
- Number of times wakeup and drink water: 7-9 times

Month 06 (Feb 10)
- Longest sleep after shower: 8-10 hours+
- Number of feeds during midnight: 0
- Number of times wakeup and drink water: 7-9 times

You can see around Jan to Feb this year, he started to form this pattern that he will keep waking up at anytime after his last feed, although no more night feeding is a remarkable milestone achieved. After ruling out teething pain, soiled diaper, hunger etc, I decided to start training him and change his habit, because the fact that he's been behaving this way for more than a month, and the thought that it might even take me years to correct him if I let him continue this way, really horrified me.

So, the training started on Feb 24. I am never an advocate of the famous Ferber's Cry-it-out method, but there are a few variations and I must say some tips are really helpful.

In a nutshell, there are a few things I followed that seemed to solve the problem:
1. Never pick him up from his cot when he's tossing and turning around.
- Challenging, because sometimes he wiggles as he needs to burp, so I have to make sure I burp him well before putting him to bed. But at least I am happy to find out that my cuddling triggered him to wake up so often in the past.

2. Put him into his cot while he's drowsy and let him sleep on his own.
- He's quite good at playing on his own till he falls asleep, but a lot of times he will cry and scream, and since I cannot pick him up, I give him water instead (which is not something very right, and might become habitual).

3. Do not feed him.
- Well I don't feed him milk, but I am still giving him water. This might be the reason why he is still waking up, as cuddling, feeding or talking to him might prompt him to wake up each night for such attention. But letting him cry his eyes out is still something I am not in favour of, especially during middle of the night.

4. Give him a few fussy minutes before responding to him.
- Sometimes we are lucky enough that he can struggle back to sleep on his own.

I thought about blogging on this topic last week, but decided to monitor him for a longer period of time in order to prove that I've found the cause and my solution is really working.

We have not achieved the ideal result yet, but at least we can see some improvement there as nowadays he awakens about 2-5 times, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that things will only get better and better..

(just for records, both picture here were taken in January 2010)