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Mar 31

Sleep

Sarah is 7 months old today! She is a very happy baby. She loves to cuddle. She is exclusively breastfeed and is now also eating 3 meals a day. She’s almost 17 pounds and is 27″ long and is very healthy. She is sitting up by herself. And she absolutely doesn’t sleep through the night.

On a typical night, I put her to bed around 7 p.m. I nurse and rock her and she is usually asleep in 10 minutes. After that, she will cry approx. every 30 minutes -1 hour. When she cries, I will go and retrieve her pacifier, and sometimes she’ll immediately go back to sleep. If not, I will get her back up, and rock/nurse again. She will go back to sleep very quickly, but the whole thing repeats itself throughout the evening.

When I go to bed, I put her in the bed beside me and we co-sleep for the rest of the night. I typically nurse her around 11 p.m. or whenever I put her in our bed, and on a good night, she will wake up once around 3:30 to nurse, and then wake up around 6 or so to nurse, and then sleep about another hour before getting up for the day at about 7:15. On a “not so good” night, like LAST night, she will wake up 5 or 6 times between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Since she is right next to me, it is not very difficult to nurse her throughout the night. And she usually only nurses for about a minute or two before going back to sleep. But obviously she can’t get herself to go back to sleep, after she wakes up, without me. Sometimes I can use the pacifier, but many times I give up and just nurse so I can go back to sleep myself!

I enjoy cosleeping and having her beside me. But I feel we are creating some bad habits that are going to be really difficult to break down the road, especially when I start to think about weaning. And frankly, I would like an uninterrupted night’s sleep. She has such a sweet spirit, that I can’t stand the idea of leaving her to “cry it out” during the night. Are there any other options?

 

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