Encouraged by the fact that Conrad managed to resettle without a bottle a couple of nights ago (i.e. he definitely isn’t waking because of hunger), I decided to finally get to it and try to actively ‘coach’ him to make this the norm. I’d been hoping for a long time that Conrad would stop needing a bottle all by himself, but I imagine the association between bottle/comfort/sleep is much too strong and he obviously doesn’t know why he should try to break that. Not only is it for the sake of me getting my nights back (selfish, I know!), but as long as I keep putting a teat in Conrad’s mouth to help him back to sleep I’m not actually helping him in the long run – to become self-reliant when it comes to sleeping when he needs it and to not fill up on milk during the night when he should be feeding during the day (with emphasis on solids now, of course).
A friend of a friend, who’s a single mum of two boys (and an accountant, not that that matters), had told me that when she needed to start planning going back to work, when her youngest (one month older than Conrad) was six months, she decided she had to stop the night feeds as she would need as much sleep she could get. So she decided: no bottle, only cuddles. The first night her little boy didn’t so much cry, but moan for about four hours…! The second night it was half an hour and the third he slept through, and, she told me, now he sleeps through most nights. I had been dreading losing as much (or more…) as four hours sleep but as it worked for her little baby, it was worth a try with Conrad.
Conrad woke up at 3.20 am that night and started to cry. After a few minutes it seemed quite clear that he wasn’t going to just drift back off to sleep himself, so I switched the green night light on and went to pick him up. It’s been a bit frustrating trying to comfort Conrad in the past; he’s been trashing around and crying (sometimes even louder from being picked up) and it hasn’t seemed to matter that he’s being held or cuddled. This was obviously worse while he was colicky, as he was in pain, but has continued since when he’s woken up at night. I guess this is part of why I thought that trying to comfort Conrad back to sleep wasn’t an option and I’ve assumed that only formula would do. But this time I persevered.
Conrad trashed around and cried in my arms. I had to keep moving my head out of the way so he wouldn’t clonk himself on the corner of my glasses and keep a firm grip so I wouldn’t drop him. But at the same time I sort of managed to hold him softly, with a hand behind his head to try to encourage him to rest against it – not that he did, but hopefully he noticed it being there. I couldn’t stop thinking about a piece of advice I’d read somewhere, that even if babies don’t stop crying and what you do doesn’t seem to make any difference, it does matter to the baby that Mummy or Daddy are there. So I started rocking him slowly and singing a lullaby (“När trollmor har lagt de elva små trollen”) in his ear, hoping he’d realise that he was safe and it was alright to calm down and just cuddle. And after a little while he did. I put Conrad back in the cot, kissed him on the cheek and tucked him in, and he was calm for a little bit before he started crying again.
I just repeated the procedure about every 5-10 minutes (whenever his crying started to become a bit more serious), determined to not open the carton of formula I had waiting on the bedside table together with scissors and bottle, and every time he seemed to calm down sooner from me holding him. And eventually, after only an hour and fifteen minutes in the end, he quietly drifted back off to sleep in his cot.
In the morning when Conrad woke up, slightly later than usual at 6.30am, he was happy and playful and not in any hurry to have breakfast, but I had time to wash and change him and then he sat on the living room emptying a bucket of plastic bricks and teething rings to chomp on while I prepared his breakfast.
So it’s ‘watch this space’ (and fingers crossed) now, for whether this will work or not…
Gabriella