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Jumping on to see replies as we're curious about this also. No advice though, sorry. i nurse A down and she's 5 months old - I'd have no chance getting her down if I didn't.

After 7 months when we sleep trained. Can you nurse her down? She's just a few weeks old, right? Too early for bad habits to start.

@Smurfette: Do you have a white noise machine or iPhone with a white noise app? Same effect as shushing, but less work for you! If Sadie's having a particularly hard time going to sleep, putting the phone with the volume up close to her ear almost always works!

ETA: I did notice that she's gotten better at going down at night & for naps ever since she started STTN. There might be some correlation there! We plan on sleep training at 4-5 months, but until then the white noise is my bff.

Hurmm.. At around 3 months I would make sure DS was full and burped and tired. I just placed him in his pnp in semi darkness with the sound machine on. He fusses and babbles any where from 5-20 mins and passes out.

Good luck!!

I nurse to sleep...Ped wants to beat me. But she would NEVER go down w/o boob. That kid FIGHTS sleep!!!!

I do whatever I need to do, lol! When she was younger, I often nursed her or rocked to sleep. Sometimes I was able to put her down sleepy with her sleep sheep and she'd fall asleep on her own. Now at 4.5 mo, I usually nurse her until she's a little sleepy, but she can fall asleep on her own as long as she has white noise (sleep sheep or homedics sound machine - $25 on Amazon - loud and can play all night). I will let her cry/fuss for up to 5 min before going in and cradling her head in my hands and shushing her until she falls asleep. Sometimes she will wake up a few times and I have to repeat, but usually she will be asleep for the night within 20 min. If she wakes up in the early morning (eg 4am) and won't go back to sleep, I put her in the swing or my bed. Bad, I know, bur mama has to sleep.

@mrskc: My LO loves the vacuum too! She will fuss and I will urn it on and settles right down and off to sleep. Our floors have never been cleaner, lol.

We go to crib after being changed/fed/burped. I turn on her noise machine and give a kiss good night. She is usually fine unless the nook falls out. Then I give it back and ssshhhh her a bit and she is back out!

@ladyfingers: My girls have done better than I expected at daycare. Sometimes they get into a routine and would actually go down easier there. Good luck!

@78h2o: nope, no swaddle at daycare. I can't even attempt to swaddle wean him right now, so I'm hoping for the best. I guess he'll be swaddle weaned soon enough

@mrsmenow: @twoofeverything: hope so! I figure we're paying the equivalent of college tuition for a reason, right? Teach my kid to sleep, please!!

@Smurfette: we used the vacuum frequently up until he was 4 months then started cutting it. Sometimes we still bring it out when he gets into a crying fit and nothing seems to calm him. Hope it works for your LO.

Oh. My. God. I was so sick of bouncing and sshhing LO to sleep every nap and every night. Finally around 4 months she was in her crib crying and I just couldn't take it so I left her there for 10 minutes. Lo and behold she stopped crying. That day changed my life. We decided to CIO train a few weeks later and it only took 3 nights of crying no more than 20 minutes. Ever since, she's been soo easy to put down.

I totally feel your pain. Every baby and every family are different, but CIO worked for us.

@Smurfette: Could her sleep issues be related to gas or colic? She's right at the time for it. My LO became a nightmare around then. Once we started with the white noise machine, shushing, bouncing, things got better. We also did every method under the sun for gas and colic. The Windi worked the best for us. We didn't sleep train him until 6 months or so. With him, we could have gone a touch earlier at 5.5 months. I remember powering through those tough sleep times. The 5 S's helped a lot.

week 6 was a really rough time for us and i came very close to CIO sleep training (i read mrs. high heels' posts on sleep training at 6 weeks over and over), but we ended up putting it off until about 11 weeks. we weren't bouncing/rocking, but we were caught in this pacifier warp where we had to either stand there and hold the pacifier in his mouth for at least 20 minutes until he fell asleep, and even then he would still wake up sometimes, or spend an hour going back repeatedly to replace the pacifier. it got old real fast and i was becoming a cranky bitch.

it's so hard to know when is the right time to have them fall asleep on their own. sounds like it worked beautifully for mrs. high heels, while our experience has been a little hit and miss.

mostly i just wanted to say i feel your pain. as people have said, there seems to be a lot of fussiness at that age.

First off, I just wanted to say I know exactly what you are going through as my LO was exactly like this as a newborn, we joked around all the time that she was the most high maintenance baby on the planet. She only liked being rocked a certain way, nursed a certain way, only held by me, etc for the first 8 or so weeks of her life. In the evenings she would scream on an off for hours and we could never put her down. Weeks 6-8 were definitely the roughest for us, as fussiness was at an all-time high. After 10-12 weeks or so, it was like a light switch went off and she was a completely different baby. She is now the happiest, easy going, calm baby. I truly think that she just had a hard time adjusting to the outside world and it took her a bit longer to get used to everything- they don’t call it the 4th trimester for nothing. 6 weeks is still sooo young and she is still so new and getting used to everything. I remember at that time just wishing away her newborn days and just wanting her to be 3-4 months old already. Now she is already almost 6 months old and I want time to slow down, and I wish I could go back to those newborn days and enjoy them more. It all went by SO FAST, even though in the moment it may not seem like it.

Babies don’t really have any self-soothing capabilities until at least 3 months. I noticed that right around 12 weeks I was gradually able to put her down more and more awake at night and she would suck her thumb and pass out. Before that, she would have just cried and cried and I couldn’t let her do that. So in the meantime, some things that worked for me were as others have mentioned, the vacuum. That was a lifesaver! If she was crying, we would just leave the vacuum on and she would calm down immediately. Another thing we did was during the day for naps, I would rock/nurse her to sleep and then lay her on her tummy when she was asleep (I know its controversial, but she wouldn’t let me lay her down any other way- if I tried her back she was up in 2 seconds). I think being on her tummy was just more comforting and helped her startle reflexes. I watched her like a hawk on the video monitor though for a long time, but she had great head control. I know things seem like they will never get better, but trust me, they will. It just takes some time.

None of what anyone has posted surprises me at all! I think we all expect babies to sleep ALL THE TIME so easily and when they don't we're not sure what to do.

My son is not a great sleeper, but eventually, he learned to fall asleep on his own. I hate to be a debbie downer, but he really didn't manage it until he was 11 months old.

@Smurfette: I started a bedtime routine about 2 weeks ago. Not that I think it puts her to sleep yet, but I think the warm bath is enjoyable and calms her down. I don't think there's anytime too young to try and start a routine, but don't expect it to "cue" her just yet. We've been able to keep the routine (though not always at the same time) about 90% of the time.

@Smurfette: yes. This was the tricky part. We would wait until he was asleep and then turn it off 5-10 min after he fell asleep. And it didn't always work but it worked most of the time. Eventually we slowly stopped using it to get him to sleep. It took time tho. And there were times that the vacuum was on 30 min - 1 hour. Just don't leave the vacuum on with the door shut. We would position it at the door so that the hot air blew out of the nursery. Sometimes DH would slowly wheel it away so the sound slowly went away rather than just shutting it off abruptly. I'm glad it at least calmed her.