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.