The struggles of sleep regression

During the past year, there have been some things that we’ve struggled with. Getting Isla to take a bottle in the first few months was one, as has her eczema which I’ll discuss later. But the biggest and most challenging problem we had was when Isla was 4 months old. I’m talking about sleep regression.

Up until then, Isla was a pretty good sleeper and would go to bed at about 7.30-8pm, wake up at 1am and then 4am for a feed and go back to sleep. But she needed either rocking back to sleep or she’d fall asleep on me, and then I’d have to wait until she was deeply asleep before I could pop her oh so carefully back into her Moses basket.

She started waking up every 90 minutes throughout the night and it was a real struggle to get her back to sleep. I hoped this was just a phase but as the weeks dragged on, I became desperate and exhausted. I needed to do something.

My sanity was saved after discovering two sources online I’d like to share with you. First of all was weebeedreaming. After doing a lot of research, I realised that as she would nap once in the morning and again in the afternoon, a big part of the problem was that Isla wasn’t napping often enough or long enough and wasn’t going to bed early enough, and was therefore getting overtired. She actually needed to be napping every couple of hours and go to bed an hour earlier according to weebeedreaming. The other issue was that Isla had come to associate breastfeeding and cuddles with sleep and wouldn’t sleep any other way. So the key was getting her to nap more and to get her to settle herself without needing boob or cuddles.

But how to get her to settle herself? The advice on sleep training was very vague and short of letting her cry it out, I couldn’t find any clear instructions of how to do it.

Until I found this on a NetMums forum….

This advice, along with following WeeBeeDreaming’s sleep schedule, was the best thing I found. When it was nap time, I made sure she was full and with a clean nappy, and popped her in her Moses basket. For the first few attempts of following these instructions, it took a long  time and a few tears for her to fall asleep, but once she did she slept for nearly 2 hours whereas usually she’d be awake after half an hour, hence why she was so overtired. That night became a bit of a battle, but she gradually improved and within a week, she was waking up just once a night! Ahhhhh blissful sleep!

This advice saved my sanity and now I’m sharing it with you, so if your little ones  have a sleep problem like Isla did, give this advice a bash. It works!