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Hi Emma,
An update a month later. He’s just turned 6 months.
We have succesfully stopped breastfeeding him to sleep during naps and at bedtime. Our settling routine now is starting with announcing he’s going to bed, going to the room and making it dark, singing a lullaby and holding him upright on my chest and breathing slowly with him to make sure he has calmed down enough before I put him down. The settling pyramid doesn’t really work that well (sushing is great, but the moment I start patting him, he cries harder until I pick him up and then there is no way to put him down again ; the crying escalates instead of calming down). That’s why we made the rule of “once we put him down, he stays there”. But that means making sure he is calm and sleepy enough already when he’s in our arms after the lullaby. A lot of his naps are now 1 hour and 20 minutes instead of 45minutes.
At night he goes to bed at 6:15 PM (we tried to make it later, but whatever we do, he’s always sleepy around that time, so we’ve embraced it). The first bottle is for my husband (between 9 to 10 PM) and then everything after is for me. I now give him a bottle too at 1 AM and noticed that he sleeps longer (till 4:30 AM), with breastfeeding he woke at 3 AM easily. The last stretch however he still wakes every hour… I now lay him next to me so he can nurse himself back to sleep each time… that way we both get some sleep til 6AM.
So the problem remains, he’s not really sleeping longer stretches… Each time we offer him a bottle, he drinks around 150ml, so we really know he needs it too. I might offer him a bottle at 4AM too, but I’m scared that will only make the problem worse, which is that he feeds too much at night already instead of during the day. But I’m not sure that he can eat more during the day.
At 7:30 AM I breastfeed (I suppose it’s around 120 to 150ml too) and then at daycare he eats 125g vegetables at 10:30 and 125g fruit at 2PM. I offer him a bottle again at 5PM (150ml). We always make a bigger bottle (180ml) but he doesn’t drink it.
I had hoped to bring a better update but alas, the reality is that we’re still sleeping very poorly.
Kind regards,
Jill