1.) I gave birth to a unusually calm and quiet baby.
2.) I put her in her crib at night.
If you follow these two steps, you also will enjoy having a baby who magically sleeps through the night.
Seriously, I have a particular Bedtime Process:
1. Around 6 or 7, give the baby a warm bath. She tires herself out kicking and splashing.
2. Feed and swaddle in a Kiddopotamus SwaddleMe
3. Cuddle & rock in a dark room til she falls asleep. Takes 5-15 minutes. Put her in the crib.
4. At 10:30, take her out of the crib and feed her without waking her up. She can drink from a bottle while sleeping if you get it far enough in her mouth. After a few weeks she learned how to nurse without waking up, so we nurse and then top her off with a bottle. Feed her until she’s so deeply asleep she can’t swallow any more. If she’s really relaxed she won’t have swallowed any air, so just burp her a little.
If all these steps are followed the baby sleeps until sometime between 6:30-8:30am, but I suspect it only works because she’s a freaky easy baby.
this article is dumb…you are praising yourself for getting your baby to sleep at night, but really you are just blessed with an easy baby. Watch out, the next ones are usually trouble after an easy one. and if the baby doesn’t want to sleep, there is nothing you can do.
Hi Milana. Well, of course I just have an easy baby. I thought the sarcasm in the first part of my post was obvious. The only thing I did was create a structured bedtime routine and provide the baby with a comforting swaddling sensation. It worked because she’s an easy baby, and that’s just the way she is.
Easy baby or not, when I did this routine she slept through the night. Before, she didn’t. I posted this in case anyone out there who read this hadn’t tried these things. Maybe it would work for them too, if they had the same type of baby as me.
And now I would like to take the time to praise myself for being so awesome that my baby was easy.
cheers!
Will try this after my son is a few weeks old!!
A dim room surely helps to get the baby sleepy! I have an eight week old baby and it surely works to feed the baby before they are fully awake!
This routine may not be easy at first, but keep on trying.
Cheers!
Our first child didn’t sleep through the night until she was two and a half years old & believe me we had tried everything, so needless to say we were dreading the sleepless nights again.
Our second child started to sleep through the night from around 6 weeks old & the only thing we did differently was that we structured feeding times, instead of feeding on demand. She feeds every 3 hours through the day at 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 6pm & the last feed at 9pm. We start bed time at 8pm, first with a nice warm bath, then get her babygrow on & feeling calm & relaxed, she then has her last feed at 9pm(ish), she is normally finished and asleep for 9.45. I know this seems late for a baby but she then sleeps until about 8.30 the next morning & is awake a lot more through the day.
I think that we are very, VERY lucky with her sleeping at such an early age but this may help someone who isn’t so lucky!!!!!
my daughter is 5 months old now and she wakes up every two hours for breastfeeding. what is the routine you mentioned here, maybe I could try it also.
Hello Maggie
The routine I used is just as described above: bath, feed, cuddle, then feed one more time before I go to sleep. I’m not an expert, but a 5-month-old should be able to hold enough in her stomach so that she’s not actually hungry at night. She’s probably waking up out of the habit and continues because she likes your company. I got my ideas for dealing with sleep problems from “Healthy Sleep Habit Happy Child” by Dr Marc Weissbluth. It’s an excellent book.
I have been doing the bath-feed-cuddle routine for a week now it seems to be working…slowly. My 8-wk old sleeps for 4 hours before waking up for another feeding (a good improvement from the every 2-hr feeding before). I also find that having tummy time right before the bath works, it tires him out.