4 Month Sleep Regression

When my best friend had her daughter she used the book Baby Wise to get her baby on a sleep/eat scheduled. And when I became pregnant many moms told me about the book too. I already knew based on the behavior of my friend's daughter that I wanted to follow this schedule also.

Right around the time I went back to work Alana started to sleep through the night! Praise Jesus! She did this for about 3.5 weeks. And then she started to wake up again. After a week or so I called my friend and she told me about the 4 month sleep regression and her doctor said as long as she is sleeping 5hrs a night she is fine (but HELLO!!! I need more than 5hrs of sleep to fully function). But it wasn't until this week that I actually Googled it and found 2 pretty good articles.

4 Month Sleep Regression

5 Reasons Why Your Child Isnt Sleeping Through The Night

A few things I took away from both were:

• You don't want to create a sleeping crutch or a new schedule. Since she was waking up we thought she wanted food so we would give her a little snack (about 1.5oz/45ml) and I did NOT want this to be something she expected every time she woke up at night.
• Let her work it out on her own. Give her 10 minutes (for 6 months and younger) to see if she will just fall back to sleep and if not then go in and comfort her.

After reading these she woke up that night at 3:21am and I just watched the baby monitor and sure enough around 3:25am she was back to sleep. Now I will tell you that those 4 minutes seemed like FOREVER!!! And I did have trouble falling back to sleep. But I feel like this a good step in the right direction!

*** A little update from when I wrote this post: She is back to sleeping through the night! 4 nights in a row now, small victories!

I will tell you that multiple people have told us to add rice cereal to her formula and that will fill her up because it has starches in it but every medical article I have read said there is no study or science behind it (and that starches actually go through our systems faster). Its essentially an old wives tale. Her doctor's website says not to do it and that it can lead to choking. And who knows what else it could lead to - childhood obesity? childhood diabetes? Not worth the risk to me.