Ella has been on a pretty solid sleep schedule...between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., she gets a bath, bottle and put to bed (in her crib- we later transfer her). She sleeps 6-8 hours until sometime between 2:30 and 4 a.m. She then sleeps another 3-4 hours until about 6:30 a.m. Not bad, right?
Yet, that middle of the night feed is still REALLY hard. We were told, "hey, if you just give her a 'dream feed' at around 10 p.m., she'll sleep through the night!" Well, that sounds GREAT! Problem was she previously wouldn't take a dream feed. So we tried again last night at around 10:30, and she took almost 2 ounces without waking up at all! We thought we had it made. This is it. The first time in 3 months that we will get a full night's sleep. SCORE.
We even had a back-up plan. Since I've read that they will still wake up for that 3 a.m. feed out of habit, we had a clean pacifier ready in the wings to stick in her mouth when the "eh, eh, eh, eh" started to soothe her back to sleep.
This is not how the night would go.
At 3 a.m., she started. We were ready. G jumped out of bed and stuck the pacifier in her mouth faster than she could get out her first "eh". Apparently, we glossed over the fact that our child does not really care for the pacifier, and the other fact that she loves to eat.
She knew. She knew it when she took that "extra" 2 ounces. Stupid parents. They think THIS will satisfy me through the night? I'll take it as a little appetizer, but I'm still going to wake up for my regular 3 1/2 ounces at 3 a.m.
So when we tried to do the pacifier trick, not only did she spit it out no less than 5 times, she got PI$$ED that we would dare try such a thing, and cried and woke herself up (she usually stays half asleep at 3 a.m. and goes back to sleep after eating). She ended up taking her regular 3 a.m. bottle and waking up 3 hours later for more.
At least we know who's the boss.
Deary...you had me smiling and laughing here. I could have written this word for word. Ped asked us how she was doing at her 4 month check-up..we told her that she would get hungry at 1:30 and then again at 4:30..Ped told us..nah..if you feed her at 10 that should be enough. We tried the paci and Olivia pretty much looked at us as if we were selling her dumb. Now we've started putting in a teaspoon of rice cereal in her 6 oz bottle and it puts her out till 4:30.
ReplyDeleteI would have loved just one wake-up a night at that age. Logan remained on the three-hour NICU sleep/eat schedule until she was five months old. I got no sleep for months!! :)
ReplyDeleteOh my gosh L, I could not deal! You're a champ!
ReplyDeleteOoh E...I may try the rice cereal trick. ;)