Night Weaning

Joey's been sleeping consistently in his crib in his room, which is awesome considering how hardcore we were co-sleeping a couple of months ago. At first, it was only a few hours at a time and he was still sleeping in bed with me or on the couch with Dan towards the end of the night. Now, I've been better about not falling asleep nursing him where we end up spending 2-4 hours asleep in the big bed. I noticed a while ago that Joey seemed to do much better during Dan's shifts of getting him when he woke up in his crib than mine. As an experiment over a weekend, Dan was the only one who went and got him, just to see what would happen. Joey slept a whopping 5 hour then 3 hour stretches, way more than he had since he'd started teething at 5mo. That clued me in to what was probably going to happen: Night Weaning. A few more days of just Dan rocking Joey back to sleep just proved my suspicions, even though Joey was still getting milk out of his cup at night (cow's milk), he wasn't expecting to nurse anymore so he was sleeping longer periods because he wasn't constantly sucking. I was actually surprised that part of the key to getting Joey to sleep longer was night weaning, but I shouldn't be I guess. When he didn't have something to suck on from the beginning (Dan's shifts), he slept longer because he didn't suddenly realize that he was missing something. When he fell asleep nursing with me, he would wake up frequently because he would realize that something was different and he wanted it back! Not so surprising when I think about it really, I would wake up too if my pillow were suddenly gone and I'd be pretty upset.

After almost a week of only Dan getting up to rock Joey, I started going in, wearing one of Dan's shirts, and just rocking him back to sleep instead of nursing. Having Dan's shirt definitely helped, as did the near-week of no nursing at night, because he went back to sleep just fine and has been more and more consistent in his sleep habits since! We've had couple of bad nights where I've had to revert to nursing because he woke all the way up and just refused to go back down with only being rocked, but those are getting further and further apart. As I write this, probably later in the morning than I should because I need to be getting ready for work, it's just after 5:00am and Joey has been asleep since 10pm last night! He woke up once after Dan came to bed, but I don't think he even really woke up because when I went to go check on him, he was still lying in his crib (sitting up is usual), so instead of picking him up, I turned on his music giraffe and started humming and rubbing his back. He fussed a little, but didn't get up and eventually I could hear his breathing change and he was back asleep. I'm hoping this means we'll have to actually pick him up less because that's the next step in the transition, it would be great if he could move on himself and we don't have to deal with extra fussing because he wants to be rocked. *Fingers crossed*

I'm glad we started this whole transition when we did, I knew it was going to take a while because we didn't want to do "Cry It Out" at all. Pretty much patience the only other option besides CIO (or co-sleep until they decide to sleep all night, but we couldn't do that with a new baby on the way), even then, they can revert back after whatever you do because of teething/illness/routine change/etc. and you get some rough nights and just have to try and be consistent until everything goes back to normal. I'm currently 22 weeks pregnant and with 18 left to go, I think we might actually have Joey sleeping consistently through the night by the time New Baby gets here to wreck all the sleep habits we're creating for ourselves ;)