What would you do?

[crayon]

I need some advice please folks. Lots of questions here.

DS3 is seven and a half months, is exclusively breast fed and still sleeps in a room with us. We don't co-sleep.

Having been very strict about self settling with DS2 (after messing up completely with DS1), I haven't been very strict this time about putting him down awake after a feed. This is because my husband works away for part of each week, I don't manage to get to bed until late after I have seen to DS1 & DS2, and I have to be up early for the school run. When I have tried to self-settle, sometimes it has worked and sometimes it takes 3 hours - 3 hours I can really not afford to loose when many a night I only have four or five hours broken sleep anyhow.

Plus he is still waking for a nightly feed which takes about an hour and a half to do (once I have got him back to sleep). I'm not sure whether he needs it or not as we have been taking weaning very slowly because his brother has food allergies (plus he gets very windy), so his meals are smallish and often still very fruit/veg based).

I'm not sure whether to drop the feed and give him water instead (though he finds it virtually impossible to take water out of a beaker), and try and get him to self settle?

I think I should really be putting him in his own room now, before he gets so used to being in with us that it is hard for him to move (I think he has just got object permanence). But, if I do so, I won't have the luxury of being able to lie in bed with him looking at me while he tries to self settle (on the rare occasions I am brave enough to try). I understand that Dr Richard Ferber now considers it to be wrong to control cry under a year, so I am not even sure how to get him to self-settle - other than to spend hours at the end of the cot 'shhhhhhh'ing.

I am tempted to move him out now (while DH has a few days' holiday and can let me have lie ins if it is very distruptive), to carry on trying to self settle him at the week-ends sometimes, but to do the major self settling once he is one and no longer breastfed.

Does anyone have any advice? Do you think it is fair to try and drop the night feed?

Many thanks.

[Lio]

PLs bear in mind this is what I would do, and not nec what I think anyone else should do:

PUt him in a different room.
Put him back in cot after feed (i.e. don't be with him the whole hour and a half). IME this takes a long time for one or two night (the setting bit) then cuts right down.

AM sure you'll get more advice too

[crayon]

Thanks Lio. That's what I would normally have done - before I heard recently that Richard Ferber had recently changed his flippin' mind about when it is OK to do controlled crying! If I do leave him, he will cry, and if I am out of the room, then surely it is controlled crying which is now regarded as not suitable.

Thanks though, I will give it all some more thought.

[terramum]

My 2.9 yr old still feeds to sleep most nights. It works, it takes MUCH less time & stress than if he has to self settle (if I go out) and it helps relax me as well. BM doesnt contain a sleep inducing substance for babies AND release a relaxing hormone for the mum for no reason imo .....if he wakes in the night then I feed him then as well. Admittedly thats not very often...but just recently he has been having a HUGE growth spurt and it was very obvious he needed the extra calories & nutrients that bm could give him...he couldnt possibly eat any more food in the day!

[Lio]

Erk, hadn't heard about the U-turn on CC!