Hellobee Boards

@travellingbee: no advice, hopefully someone else can help...but LOTS of support and commiseration...my 5.5 month old woke up four times last night and I have to work today. It's brutal. I hope things get better for you and I'll be reading along with any advice you get!

L's sleep went to crap from about 5 months until recently (8 months). It hit a bad peak in there too. It was the same as you described, so the first thing i can tell you is that it will hopefully pass. Even it seems like it won't, it will.

I also was not into CIO, so i tried just about everything else. I co-slept, which worked sometimes. Now that he crawls, i am too afraid to that and he just moves around too much so i really can't sleep.

Anyway, so the mains things we did was make him more comfortable. We noticed that when we let him nap in a comfy, soft queen size bed, he would nap straight for up to 2 hours, no rolling, nothing! he slept like a king in a queen bed, lol. Plus i had another friend that said the first night they got a softer mattress, her baby slept 10 hours straight! So we got a softer mattress (we got one with a "toddler side" and used that side right away), we stopped using sleep sacks and gave him a blanket, and we also got blackout curtains and made sure a fan was always on in his room (air conditioner was installed too for heat waves). All this combined has led to a baby that sleeps all night with 1 wake up, sometimes none, 2 wakeups on a bad night. He still rolls over in his sleep, but he will stay asleep.

bottom line i learned - make the baby as comfortable as YOU need to be to sleep!

And I also freaked about tummy sleep at first and would roll her back over, but I researched it a ton and even asked msJacks on here and the general consensus is that at 4 months, babies have the same instinct that we do - that if something is restricting their breathing - they know to move, instinctively. So that made me feel a lot better...And even if I moved her, I'd wake up and see on the monitor that she was on her tummy again, and I couldn't risk waking her up AGAIN to flip her. So I just went with it and she was always fine:)

@travellingbee: yes! i swear by making them more comfortable. all the safety recommendations are basically things that i would myself would not be comfortable sleeping in. Oh and I said we gave a blanket, but recently took it away because he would just kick it off and not use it anyway.

The last thing I forgot to mention was last week we got a bumper because it seemed that his one wake up happened when he rolled into the side of the crib and hit his head or stick a limb through the slats. So the first night with the bumper, he had zero wake ups! Now i even see him on the monitor sleeping with his back curled up against the corner of the crib/bumper and i think he is comfortable like that! so the bumper was a huge factor too.

He also started sleeping more and better when i moved his bedtime down closer to 7pm and i think he wakes up once because he just can't go 12 hours without one nursing session which i am okay with. So ya, i think there are LOTS of things you can try before CIO. And as anti-CIO as i am, i will admit to letting those thoughts cross my mind during the worst of times, but decided I cannot even go there until i could confidently say I tried everything else and then I didn't have to!

To specifically answer your question, L does sleep peacefully on his tummy. We start him out on his back, then he rolls to his tummy or side at some point, sometimes he rolls more than once, and he stays asleep. Our only problem now is that in his sleep he sometimes rolls to his tummy then reflexively goes into sitting up position and THAT wakes him up! But like i said, he wakes once a night on a average, sometimes none.

ETA: I just wanted to emphasize that before we got the new mattress, we also thought we should because he was not only rolling, but squirming around and LOOKED like he was trying to get comfortable. It was just so different from how he napped on the queen soft bed we have, but of course i could not sleep in the bed overnight night because i couldn't watch him on the monitor! i joked to DH that we just need to build a crib around the queen mattress and then our problems would be solved! Lol, or cut the queen mattress to fit the crib.

@PrincessBaby: That is what our pediatrician told me when I mentioned she immediately rolls over when I put her in the crib. She said if she is putting herself that way, just leave her. But she also isn't crying, she seems to like it better.

@Mrs. High Heels: I do! I personally am still very proud of myself and he was pretty baffled by all this time we have together now! He thinks it's kind of crazy, lol...And it also has helped me to be tougher on the whole... I had to kick them out today so I could take care of bills, laundry, and some stuff for a wedding I'm in and I can't get anything done with H around, even while he's here. So I got her dressed, and handed her over and forced them out. No guilt here. I told them I do not want to see them for 2 hours. I think the CIO made me tougher, in general:) If I survived that, nothing else is that big of a deal. So I'm totally okay with doing things like telling him to get the heck out of here with our daughter:)

@Mrs. High Heels: DH just texted me, "Let us know when we are allowed home" LOL

@Mrs. High Heels: Exactly! He takes care of everything he needs to do and I end up starting 5 different things 20 different times only to never get even 1 thing completed. Meanwhile, he thinks nothing of sitting on the laptop or phone forever handling his personal business. I know he has to do that stuff but SO DO I!

I digress! Sorry to threadjack- but my point is that CIO toughened me up! I'm hard core now, lol!

We went through this as well...for us, it got better after a few weeks when he learned how to roll back to his back and could do it consistently, even when half asleep. But then he started prefering to sleep on his tummy. I would definitely not stress about tummy sleeping at his age, so I wouldn't worry about getting an angel care monitor. Honestly, I think your options are to either wait it out (and keep flipping him back when he cries on his tummy) or do some sort of sleep training. We eventually had to do that, and used a modified CIO where we would do checks and soothe him but not move him back to his back.

Also 4.5 month is an age of HUGE sleep changes/transitions--it's right in the middle of the 4 month sleep regression. If you can, I would give it another few weeks, and see if he improves on his own. If not, then at least you'll be closer to the optimal time to sleep train if that's what you decide to do.

We went through a 4 month sleep regression for 3.5 months so I hear ya! I was also working FT...that's when decaf came back into my life!

I succumbed to CIO it once and it did jack for me. My LO could cry longer than an hour and each night she actually cried longer. Sigh. I gave up on night 3.

I just learned to live off of minimal sleep.

GL!