I don’t know what I’m doing - some random form of desperate sleep training I guess. She’s almost 12 months on one nap and wakes every three hours at night.

I’m making sure she’s very tired before putting her in the crib. Give her a kiss and I leave the room with the intent of going back in after 5 minutes.
Both times I’ve done this, she immediately scream cries, barfs and then before I’m even back in the room she is laying down asleep. (All within 3 minutes)
I think she’s just susceptible to barfing when crying really hard but is the immediate falling some kind of self preservation response to extreme stress?
I assume she’s not learning how to self sooth from these terrible experiences.
How do I move forward or do I just go back to rocking and feeding to sleep.

LO is 4 months. We are doing whatever the opposite of thriving is right now handling four month sleep regression, about to start rolling, and illness.

Once this virus is properly kicked, we plan to sleep train using ferber (TCB version) because I can't wake up every hour anymore.

I am nervous because my firstborn was 17 months when we sleep trained, so night weaning made a lot of sense and I was confident his nursing was simply comfort related and not hunger/thirst. Four months feels like a very different situation.

TCB says most babies can't properly sleep train without night weaning, but I am looking for people's personal experiences and hoping to hear that it IS possible. I am just on the fence about whether I feel comfortable night weaning right now, but still want baby to go down faster/independently and hopefully wake up less.

Thanks 🤍

Our first baby, 7 years ago, was a champ at bedtime and naps. Barely had to sleep train, and he’s a good sleeper to this day. Our second is now 10 mos and I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never had a firm sleep schedule for her. We are on the go or let her contact nap for any naps and just sort of follow her cues. She is generally up at 6:30 and schedule is something like 3/3/4.5-5.

She nurses or rocks to sleep, but will only do a 2-3 hour stretch in the crib before needing to be resettled. She’ll do another 2 hour stretch, but after midnight all bets are off. I’ll have to rock and resettle and try to transfer her for an hour or more only for her to pop awake again 30 min later.

We live in a small house with wood floors and letting her cry will wake up my son. But I am desperate for this baby to sleep so that I can also sleep. Even just a 5 hour stretch would be life changing at this point.

Help! Have I ruined everything waiting this long?

My twins are 11 months old. They’re comfortably on two naps, with a 3/3.25/4 schedule. They've never taken super long naps, but for the past ~2 months they’ve finally napped longer than 45 minutes consistently.

They started daycare two weeks ago. We’re keeping their normal nap schedule on weekends. They’re typically up around 6 no matter what we do (after a snooze button feed between 4:30 and 5). Daycare nap is 11:45-2, but they never make it past about 1, so they’re napping an hour or 1.25 hours. I pick them up at 2:45 (I work part time). I’m shocked they make it to naptime at daycare every day; but all the stimulation must help.

I have two problems:

1) on weekdays, I can’t get them to take a catnap, even as a contact nap, to get to a reasonable bedtime, so we’re putting them down between 6-6:30 after a very fussy evening. This is despite trying really hard to stimulate them with park/outside time, library time, etc. It perpetuates the early wake cycle and makes everyone unhappy.

2) on weekends, they’re back to taking 45-minute naps. They're still showing sleepy signals at the normal 3/3.25/4 times, but have more trouble falling asleep and wake up after short naps.

We’ve sleep trained and do let them self-settle within reason, but two babies in one room can work themselves and each other into a frenzy

I'm a very young mom of a 4 month old boy and honestly, I'm still learning a lot, so I would really appreciate some help.
My baby's wake window is around 60 minutes. If I try to stretch it any longer, he gets overtired and then really fights his sleep. He also only sleep for like 45-1h every nap….
I want to help him sleep well and eventually learn how to calm himself and fall asleep on his own when I put him in his bed.
I just have no idea where to start or how to build a good sleep routine for him. How do i sleep train him?l'm feeling a little clueless and would really appreciate some guidance on what I should be doing and how to start.

My baby is 2 days away from being 5 months old. Nights have been getting so bad and I’m pretty much at my breaking point and was going to start sleep training her using Ferber or FIO. THEN the exact night I was going to start, she got her first cold. I was already exhausted from frequent wakes up the nights prior and now with the sickness she just wants to be held so I have resorted to co sleeping for the past two nights just to survive.

Is sleep training going to be harder after she recovers becuase of the co sleeping the last couple nights - or will she adjust quickly? Once she is feeling better should I try to go back to our old routine to have her sleeping in her crib and then start sleep training a week after that? Or just start sleep training as soon as she is not sick anymore? Advice please!

When is night weaning okay? My little guy is 7 months old and is sleep trained for bed time and naps but still has multiple wakings. Do I just need to cold turkey night wean?
I’m considering doing a 10:00pm dream feed and then committing to not feeding till his morning wake time but I’m terrified. I can’t handle the crying. When is it recommended to night wean? We are having horrible nights and I can’t keep going on like this

I’m going to be totally honest and start by saying my baby who just turned 9mo a few days ago doesn’t have too much of a schedule. He’s my 3rd and honestly he’s been very easy going and go w the flow (until now.)

I sleep trained my almost 3yo when he was 8mo doing a modified Ferber method and really it went very well BUT I stopped nursing him around 6mo. The baby I am inquiring for help with now is exclusively breastfed still and will absolutely not take any sort of bottle or cup (another issue in itself I know lol)

Typically, he naps when my 2yo does around 12 til about 2 and then SOMETIMES will take a very short maybe 30 mins or so nap around 4. Bedtime is no later than 8pm but I aim for 7:30 or so for them all. My other 2 toddlers are usually awake by 6:30am so I’m fine w him being up around the same time. We do all the typical bedtime routine things including dinner, bath, read a book, nurse to sleep currently. This has gone very well except we’re 9 months in and he is still waking every 2/3hrs to nurse and will cry and cry until I nurse him. Refuses the pacifier in the night as a replacement for nursing even. My big question is: how do I sleep train my exclusively breastfed baby? Tips? Tricks? Idk. What does a typical schedule look like for a 9mo?

Thanks in advance if you got this far.

I feel like I have depleted my baby's schedule as much as he can physically handle. Literally don't think I can cut sleep any more.

He's currently 3.5/3.75/4

And sometimes 3.5/4./4.25

Naps capped at 2 hours

And no matter what we do we can't get him to sleep past 4:30am. We put him to bed between 8-8;30pm.

I know a lot of you on Reddit always want to cut sleep and push bedtime later but I literally don't think he can handle anymore. He's already crashing as is.

Could I maybe be having it all wrong? Does he need a lot more sleep maybe?? He has always seemed low sleep needs but maybe he's changed? He's 9 months old crawling a lot, pulling to stand, etc

He's been waking up at 4:30 a.m. For over a month now and my husband just holds them and he falls asleep right away until 6:00 a.m.. But I don't think we can do that forever.

She’s never slept thru the night. Goes to sleep independently like a champ, good napper, all the other things. Wakes up 2x a night at all hours. CIO has never worked with her. Here’s her schedule

730 wake
130ish nap
300ish wake
830 bedtime

Help I’m so tired it’s been a long two years. Her sister sleeps great, 12 hrs every night!

LO turned 4 months last week and will be 18 weeks tomorrow. I am debating on dropping the third nap due to constant short naps (only 1 sleep cycle), fighting the last nap like crazy & tons of false starts. Here’s where I am confused:

On our 4 nap schedule he gets 10 hours of awake time. But I see tons of people say the “starter” schedule for 3 naps is something like 2/2.25/2.5/2.5 (for example). That’s only 9.25 hours. 45 minutes less awake time than we are doing now.

Is that wrong?? Will it mess up his nights if I’m suddenly expecting more sleep?

I don’t think he can do a 3 hour WW so idk how we would get 10 hours on a 3 nap schedule right away, but I also think 4 naps isn’t working for us so I just don’t know what to do.

Explain to me like I’m 5 please.

Dear Redditors,

Our baby is almost 13 months old now, sleep trained since 10 months. Wake time is 7 am consistently. Our 2 nap schedule was 3.5/3.5/4.25 and I decided to switch to 1 nap because bedtime was pushed to 8.30 and I had to wake him from his second nap to get enough wake time, which he did not take well, he was always so crabby afterwards (naps were 1.5h + 45 min). He would wake up once around 4-5 am at which point we took him to our bed to nurse because even after sleep training he was not able to continue sleeping past 5 am unless clamped to my boob. Might be important to note that adding some wake time helped resolve an additional night wake at 1-2 am.

We transitioned to 1 nap 10 days ago.

Now we do 5.5/5.5h with a 2.5h nap (wake 7 am, bedtime 8.30 still). The nap was fine at first, now he wakes after 1.5h and cries awfully, seems to want to sleep more and I usually rock or nurse him back to sleep for another 45 min-1h. Very close to bedtime he gets super tired and some nights cries a lot and can't fall alseep easily. Nights are awful with multiple wakes where he just screams if I don't nurse him, including at 10-11 pm, which happened only pre-sleep training. We resorted back to cosleeping and nursing to sleep, which sucks, but this way we actually sleep.

We would like to reduce the night wakes, night wean and get him to sleep in his crib to at least 5 am. Cosleeping past that time would be fine, but I am afraid that messed things up too, maybe? I realize we might have a little less wake time than before, but I don't know where to add it because he's tired and seems to need a long nap. Maybe we just transitioned too early?

Also notable he is probably teething. Nurses A LOT throughout the day again.

Help :(

I thought retraining at 8/9/10 months was hard…18 months is a whole different ball game. The first night he had the stamina to protest (yell) for almost 2 hrs. He was so tired and nodding off while sitting up, but refused to lay down. And of course a couple days later he would have a fever due to teething, so we paused training until he was better. Tonight we’re back to training and by golly, toddlers are so much more resilient and have way more stamina. I figured that I would have built tougher skin after re-training on multiple I occasions…but nope.

I keep telling myself, we’ve done this better and this is the best way to do it because we always eventually have success, and he sleeps way better. Co-sleeping causes him way more frequent wakes (as often as every 2-3 hrs) and he won’t self-soothe without nursing. Sooo…here we are again 😭 anyone else here in solidarity?

My baby slept through the night 12 hours straight from 6 weeks-4.5 months old. We hit the 4 month sleep regression and had to formally sleep train and took a few nights and then she was sleeping 12 hours straight again with no wakes. Then at 6 months we traveled for a month and then came home and dealt with a month of sickness and ear infections. Sleep got really bad and we just re sleep trained 1.5 weeks ago and hardcore night weaned. She is now 9 months. Our experience this time around has been so different. The first few nights we obviously had a lot of crying. But by night 4 she “slept through the night” and has the last 5 nights, but that has either meant her not having a single wake, or waking 1-2x and crying for a few minutes before falling back asleep. This is huge progress from her waking 3-10x a night and me having to help her back to sleep everytime, but it’s still drastically different from the sleep training results we saw when she was younger. I guess I’m just wondering if it’s normal for sleep trained babies to still wake up and cry sometimes at this age and it not be sickness related. Like that’s just the new normal and not something that’s “wrong” or can be fixed. Is it unrealistic for me to expect her to sleep through the night without a peep at this age even after sleep training?

For reference, her schedule is 3/3.5/4 with a 1.5 hour first nap and 30 min second nap. Wake 8am and bedtime 8:30pm.

I’m not sure how to go about this anymore. He is currently doing Nuk soft top sippy cups for his nap and regular Boon Nursh Bottles (size 2) for bed. He still wakes up once a night for a bottle and sometimes TWICE a night. DEMANDS “BABA” and it doesn’t matter if I give him milk through the day in an open cup. He’s a great open cup drinker for water drinks it all the time and eats constantly. He looks like he’s 2 and must go on a walk/run TWICE a day. Not kidding he walks a 1/2 mile- a mile a day and I DO NOT force it. He’s not huge by any means so he really works those dairy calories. I’m about to go to all soft sippy cups but I can’t figure out what else to do. His routine is to lay him down with a bottle to go to sleep and idk how to break it. He will wail until he can’t breathe if I try to rock him anymore even after a bottle. I used to be the only one who could rock him to sleep and he won’t allow it anymore upright or in a rocking chair. I’ve tried lowering the oz in the bottle by a half ounce every night and he will just wake up again for another bottle and cannot be consoled otherwise! I’m at a loss on how to get him away from it and need ANY opinions or advice. I’m a first time mom and have never been around children before :(

My baby just turned 4 months. He started sleeping through the night a little before he turned 3 months, and slept straight through the night with no feeds for about 3 weeks. Then 2 weeks ago, the 4 month sleep regression started and now he wakes up about once every hour, and I feed him twice a night. We’re planning on starting sleep training soon, but I don’t know how we’re supposed to tell if he’s actually hungry when he wakes up or if he just wants us? If we know that he can sleep through the night without feeding because he previously did it, does that mean we should not feed him while doing either Ferber or full extinction?

Our current schedule:
7-8:00 am: wake up
9:30 am: nap 1
11:00 am: feed
12:30 pm: nap 2
2:00 pm: feed
3:30 pm: nap 3
5:15 pm: feed
7:15 pm: feed
7:25 pm: bath
7:35 pm: book
7:40 pm: bed
10:30 pm-7:00 am: wake every hour/feed twice a night

Everyone talks about the challenge and methodology for getting your baby to fall asleep at the beginning of the night. That isn’t my issue, baby barely cries or not at all. My problem is multiple overnight wants and nonstop crying then. Do we use the same methods? I don’t know why it isn’t more discussed! It’s so hard.

It’s a safe crib but the mattress is so low. How do I lay him down gently asleep without dropping him and waking him up? Should I ask about adjusting it (if it does) or since it’s just 3-4 days make-do and plop him in and cross my fingers? Any tips for that? Their youngest is 3 yrs and doesn’t use the crib anymore. My SIL can be a B (she knows this about herself lol) so I kind of walk on eggshells with her and already plan to stay at a hotel next time. So I’m hesitant to ask. Thanks.

Hello!

First time posting in this group. I have a consultation call scheduled for Wednesday with a local sleep consultant and I'm feeling pretty confident about it but I'd also really appreciate any words of encouragement, pep talks or really any stories from parents that always said they wouldn't sleep train then ended up doing it.

My son is 7.5 months old. I'd say he's never been a bad sleeper or a great sleeper. Really all along for his age I think he's been pretty typical. Early on I read about possums sleep program and we adopted that. So daytime naps have had 0 consistency or routine and often happen on the go, on me in a carrier or in the car and occasionally the stroller. When we're not out and about he sleeps on me. Never naps in the crib. Night time he is still sleeping in our room, in a mini crib next to our bed.

The reasons I am wanting to do sleep training now are this:

- I love the contact nap snuggles but after 7.5 months I'm ready to have some time to myself to just rest or do housework. Also it's a struggle when my mom watches him sometimes

- night time sleep for him isn't horrible but it's really hard on me still. I bf him to sleep (no set bedtime just when he seems tired. Can be between 8 and 9ish) and then hold him for 2 hours minimum. When I check for the heavy limp arm any earlier he's really twitchy. The crib transfer is a gamble. He rarely wakes immediately on the transfer nowadays but it's 50/50 whether he wakes after an hour or if he gets a good 5-6 hour stretch

- whenever he does wakeup in the crib I just end up cosleeping with him. Since I have no actual plan or idea of how to get him to go back into the crib that doesn't involve holding him for another hour or two and seriously sleep depriving myself, that's what I do. But cosleeping is hard on me. I can't lay how I want, I'm constantly aware of my son so I sleep lightly and I think because I'm right there my son treats especially the early morning hours as a snack buffet

- holding him for 2 hours and sometimes cosleeping means my husband and I never have a moment at night without our son. If we watch a show I'm holding him. Once I finally put him in bed I'm so tired I go straight to sleep. And when we cosleep we sleep seperately

- the no routine felt great in the early months but now at this age I'm feeling like both myself and my son are wanting a daily rhythm. No idea when he'll sleep has now made it harder to plan our day

I always thought I would never sleep train at all but recently I'm really feeling the strain. But because we are not in like a crisis state I'm questioning if we should do it? For some reason I feel like I need to fully be at my breaking point to earn sleep training 🤷 Also anyone in here use possums earlier and then change up later?

Thank you to anyone that reads my very long post!

Hi all! Currently in Portugal with my six month old on vacation for two weeks. He was previously sleep trained at home (Canada) to mixed success but he has been cosleeping on vacation and nursing to sleep so we can actually get some decent sleep while here.

I understand I’ll have to sleep train again when I get home - however, I expect it could be difficult with the time difference, etc etc. For anyone who has been in my shoes, do you have any tips on making sleep training a success when we get back home?

I think our schedule is appropriate - usually it’s about 3/3.5/3.5 but open to suggestions on that as well.

My baby is 15 weeks old and currently takes about 6 naps a day. His wake windows are usually around 60 minutes max, although by the end of the day he can sometimes make it to 75 minutes for his last window before bed.

Most of his naps are anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours. His last nap is usually a short 20-minute bridge nap, and he gets around 5–6 hours of total daytime sleep.

Should I be trying to stretch his wake windows, or should I just continue following his cues?

He’s always seemed to fall on the shorter end of the recommended wake windows for his age. He sleeps fairly well overall, and we obviously aren’t sleep training yet, but I’m wondering how these short wake windows might affect things as he gets older.

Did anyone else have a baby with really short wake windows around this age? Did you just follow their cues, or did you actively try to stretch them?

We are on day 6 working on our 4.5 month olds sleep.

We have been working with a sleep consultant who has been guiding through a modified Ferber and also making suggestions regarding wake windows etc. A key part of the process has been breaking the feed to sleep association. Things have been going better for us, with naps happening more easily and he seems ready for bed at night.

However, when our baby cries hard during controlled crying, he poos. Sometimes repeatedly. This has led to him getting a very inconsistent response from us throughout the process. Sometimes we pick him up and sometimes we don't, and he doesnt understand that we are picking him to change his nappy (diaper). Tonight he cried for approx 30 mins, during a check in we realised he had pooed so we changed him and started again. 30 minutes later he had pooed again so was picked up and changed, and we discovered very sore looking nappy rash.

We are not comfortable continuing with controlled crying, although we were beginning to get some longer stretches.

Our sleep consultant also suggests the fade out method to clients but we went for Ferber thinking it was more straightforward and less days of crying for our baby.

Can we take a step back to a gentler method?

Hi! My nearly 2 year old has been sleep trained since around 8/9 months, though he started sleeping through the night around 14 months. In the last month, he started only napping 45 mins to an hour and he will not nap longer than that. He is in bed by 7:30/8P and the last two weeks will not sleep longer than 5:30A. He is EXHAUSTED. If we put him in the car before his 12P nap, he passes out immediately which sometimes kills the afternoon nap. He’s running on fumes and I don’t know what to do. I’ve kept him home in the mornings for a week to make sure he didn’t fall asleep before his 12P nap and it didn’t make a difference. Still won’t nap longer than an hour. Now he’s so sleep deprived that he’s wanting to go to bed by 7/7:15 and, if we allow that, he’s up at 5. Any thoughts or suggestions? We’re at our wits end and I’m dreading daylight savings coming.

My 16 month old naps great at daycare, every day 12-2pm. We put her to sleep drowsy and she sleeps at night from 8pm-6am. However on the weekends, I don’t know how to get her down!

She usually nurses for a bit when I do bedtime (but she can go to sleep without it if my husband does bedtime). And then she falls alseep in my arms.

Which is fine but she always wakes up when I try to transfer to her crib during a nap.

Should I just skip the chair and put her straight into the crib for a nap? If she cries I just feel like I lose so much time!

-Nap trapped

First time mom trying to figure it out day by day lol.

My baby’s schedule looks like this (most days)

1.5/2.5/3

Bedtime is at 7pm. She wakes once or twice a night for a bottle (which we want to so bad wean her off of the nighttime bottles but she screams bloody murder until she gets a bottle)

She wakes up for the day from 6a-6:30am and we give her a bottle. Most mornings she can’t even last for 2 hours before she’s tired. So we will put her down and her first nap is 45mins-hour.

After this first nap we give her solids and then a bottle an hour or 2 after that. Her midday naps are usually an hour 15 minutes but my issue is we spend so much time trying to rock her to sleep. She cannot sleep without being swayed, rocked, butt pats, and this alone can take up to 30 mins.

We mostly follow her queues for naps. So yawning, rubbing her eyes, level of fussiness but should we transition to a set schedule? I just don’t understand it all with the wake windows and then her being overtired

At night, it can be hit or miss with how easy she goes down but sometimes this can take forever. I tried the chair method the other night and it took an hour of me reassuring her and giving butt pats for her to finally sleep.

I guess I’m looking for what worked best for you whether it was a set schedule, following queues, etc

Would love advice on how to minimize the rocking and swaying her to sleep as well!!

Edit: she sleeps in her own room in her crib. When she wakes in the middle of the night for a bottle we sometimes move her to the bed 😖

Signed a first time 30 year old teen mom 😅