Hellobee Boards

For what it’s worth - for my 8 mo old we are doing a Ferber-like combo and it seems to be going ok. I put him down in the crib awake following our bedtime routine and we do Ferber checks til he falls asleep. Then we’ve decided that the first wake up after 11 pm and the first wake up after 3 am will be nursing. So if he wakes up at 10:30, we do Ferber checks until he falls back to sleep. If he wakes up at 11:15, I go in and pick him up and nurse him. He usually falls back asleep in my arms and stays asleep when I move him to the crib. If his next wake up is 2:30, Ferber checks. If it is 3:30, nurse.

He’s gotten to the point where he’ll wake up and cry for about 5-7 min and then if it’s not nursing time, he’ll put himself back to sleep. The rough ones are where it’s close-but-not-quite nursing time - he usually cries longer then. And, my new problem is going to be weaning him down to one (and then no) feedings.

But to your question of if you can somehow merge Ferber and nursing, it seems to be working ok for us.

I’m not sure I should ever offer advice on sleep threads since my older daughter still fights sleep at 5, but...

That’s kind of what we did. We didn’t do checks at bedtime because it just made it worse, so we let her CIO at bedtime. Then we had a set time i wouldn’t go in and nurse before (like, 11 pm or something). So if she woke up before my husband might go in or not, but after that time I’d nurse and put her back down. Same thing after, say 3 am or something. We did try CIO for the night wakings but she pretty much had way more will power than we did. She dropped the last night feeding at 9 months on her own.

It helped me personally to have a set time and stick to it. As she started sleeping longer we pushed that time back and she only woke up once overnight to nurse for a long time, which I was ok with.

@jedeve: It didn’t reduce the number of times he fed (which I believe was 2 at the time). It reduced (or eliminated) the times he would wake up and cry to be rocked back to sleep. But to be honest, this was pretty rare for him as it was.
Basically my goal was just to learn to be put down awake without crying. Once that was learned, he went down to 1 feeding within a couple weeks. And from then on, if he woke up in the night he would just kind of roll around and fall back asleep on his own. He still ate 1x/night most nights until 11 months.

We did this, around 5-6 months. In Precious Little Sleep, it claims at least that if they go down on their own and you let them CIO if they wake up before 3 hours, it will take care of most unnecessary nighttime wakings. They will still wakeup if they are used to being fed. But that's not about not knowing how to transition between sleep cycles on their own, it's about hunger.

This did cut down night wakings for us, though there have been regressions periodically due to illness or developmental leaps. He still eats overnight.

@ALV91711: We did it around the 4 month mark, but she really responded to it like textbook (and it was only for bedtime, i didn't do it for MOTN wakings). I tried with #2 at the 6 month, 8 month, 12 month and couldn't do it...i actually can't even remember how we ended up getting to sleep through the night!

@jedeve: did you start last night? How did it go? My guy is just over 3 months but I’m thinking after the holidays we are going to have to do some sleep training for going to bed.

@gestalt: good to know that it worked so well young. I don’t think I’ll make it to 6+ months and I hope that some sleep training to go to sleep will help with his night wakings.

That is awesome!