Night-weaning

The time has finally come. After Christmas and all the illness and upheaval, I had let Finn get into the habit of nursing all night long.  My hope had been that as life got back to normal, the night wakings and nursing would return to normal as well. I was sadly mistaken. If anything, in January and February he started waking more and wanting to nurse more and more during the night until we were nursing nearly every hour. This is nothing new for us, of course, but in the past when I have looked into night-weaning all the books and articles I have found said the same thing: night-weaning and co-sleeping were incompatible. It seemed that if I wanted to eliminate one, I would have to eliminate both. I desperately wanted to be done nursing all night long, but I was not ready to give up co-sleeping, so I trudged on.

But then as I was hopelessly researching the subject of night-weaning once again, I stumbled across this article by Dr. Jay Gordon: http://drjaygordon.com/attachment/sleeppattern.html  It was the first article I had read that gave me the immediate sense that this was a plan that I could follow and that might actually work for us. I had Ben read it too and his comment was "Wow. He knows Finnleif well." Exactly! This spoke to our situation perfectly.

I didn't follow his plan exactly. We actually started on step 2. I know Finn well enough to know that taking him off the breast before he falls asleep would make him just as angry and frustrated as just saying "no" in the first place, so why torture him (and me) unnecessarily? We started out by talking to him during our bedtime routine about the change that was about to take place. I told him that the nursies were tired and so he could nurse right before bed but then the nursies were going to go to sleep and they wouldn't wake up until morning, just like he was going to go to sleep and not wake up until morning. I felt like I might as well throw that last pitch in there and see if I couldn't get him to sleep through the night as well just by suggesting it.

The first week was rough. He did some screaming and clawing at my shirt, but I stuck to the plan and told him the nursies were sleeping. Once he realized I wasn't going to give in, he climbed on top of me and laid his head down on my chest and fell asleep. That wasn't quite what I had in mind, but at least he wasn't nursing! Oh, how my back ached that week with 23 pounds of toddler lying on top of me for hours on end, but as things progressed, he even started falling asleep just lying next to me.

After that first week he started consolidating his sleep more and would sleep un-aided for 3-4 hours at a time. One night, even though I was technically sleeping in his bed with him, he didn't wake me up or need to cuddle at all the entire night, but put himself back to sleep whenever he woke briefly.

Now we are about a month into our night-weaning routine and I would say it has been thoroughly successful. Now I only nurse before bed and in the morning (even if he wakes before 11 pm). Finn seems to understand and he no longer demands to nurse by screaming and yanking on my shirt and I no longer have to tell him that the nursies are sleeping.

The biggest breakthrough came last night when he slept the entire night by himself in his bed without needing any assistance from me!  I woke up at 2:30, shocked that he had not awoken yet and then spent the rest of the night in my own bed waking up every 20 minutes to check the baby monitor. If Finn keeps this up, I will be the one needing sleep training next!

This has been a long 20 month journey and I know that it is nowhere near over. I fully expect that most night will not look like last night, but I am hopeful for the first time in a long time that his night wakings will become fewer and fewer until one day they are no longer a problem for either of us.

Hugless Douglas

Finn has always liked books from a very early age. But the first book that he really started to interact with (point at the pictures, laugh at parts of the story, etc) was a book called Hugless Douglas which was given to him by my friend and former employer in Bozeman, Bill Bradley and his family.
I thought this deeper interest in books would extend to all books, and it has in many ways, but not to the same level as with Hugless Douglas. It has become his absolute favorite. He requests (maybe "demands" is a better word) that we read it every night at the exclusion of all other stories. When Ben and I have tried to sneak a different book in, Finn will get up out of bed, find Hugless Douglas and plop it down on top of whatever story we are trying to read.
His devotion to this book has recently reached new heights. Lately, when he wakes up from a nap, he will come out into the living room clutching this book. When he wakes up at 5:30 in the morning he somehow finds it in the total darkness of his room, brings it into bed and sets it, not very gently, on my face.  This morning when he woke up, he couldn't find Hugless Douglas (because he had left it in Mommy and Daddy's room last night) and so he rummaged through his book pile until he found the book jacket for Hugless Douglas and brought that to me to read. Fortunately(?), since I now read this book to him 3-4 times a day I have the gist of it memorized so that I can recite some version of it to him, even at 5:30 in the morning, when I am nowhere near being awake and the book is being pressed into my face.

UPDATE: Ben has started asking Finn at the end of the book "Who does Douglas hug?" (the answer is his Mommy). At first Finn wouldn't say anything, but the past couple of times Finn has turned to Ben and whispered "Dadda." Yet another example of how this kid is Daddy's boy all the way!