New Mummy Blog: How I Manage To Get A Full Night's Sleep

It’s been seven months since we slept through the night. Of course we went into parenthood with our eyes wide open (or propped up by matchsticks at least), knowing full well that sleepless nights would follow.

But we also believed the parenting books we read that told us by this stage, our little one would be sleeping through the night for 12 hours straight.

Instead, we somehow fell into some very bad sleep habits, with Honor waking up countless times each night. We were nowhere near the textbook ideal and had no idea how to get there.

When Honor reached six months, people suggested we tried controlled crying; desperate times called for desperate measures. But I was reluctant to go there, being too big a softie to leave my baby crying alone for any amount of time.

So I was relieved when the health visitor recommended that we didn’t use that method anyway, telling me that Honor was not the sort of baby that would respond well to it and was likely to become irate at being ‘teased’ by being left in her cot and her parents returning to soothe her intermittently.

[New Mummy blog: At 31 Weeks We Got A Glimpse Of The Teenage Tantrums To Come]
[New Mummy Blog: I don't know how to cope without my baby]

Instead, we tried a different solution. One of the biggest problems we had was that Honor was still associating nighttime waking with feeding. She would wake, I would go to her and she would want to be fed back to sleep (I know, I wasn’t helping matters but it was the path of least resistance).

We knew she wasn’t hungry. She was doing well with solid foods and was getting plenty throughout the day to allow her to go through the night without waking for a feed. It was simply habit.

So, as it looked like I was the problem, we decided the best thing to do would be to remove me from the situation. For three nights, each time Honor woke, Adam would go to her instead, to see if we could teach her to get back to sleep without thinking she needed a feed.

The first night was awful. She woke for the first time at 9.30pm, having gone to sleep around 7pm. Adam went to her, and she was furious. He was not the parent she wanted to see. He stayed with her, alternating between picking her up and rocking her and trying to get her to lie in her cot while he stroked her back.

She was outraged, and screamed for an hour and three quarters before eventually exhausting herself back to sleep. Adam left the room shaken. He crawled into bed, and got an hour’s sleep before round two began.

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[New Mummy Blog: Moving our child to her own bedroom]

This time she only took half an hour to settle. Still half an hour too long, especially as she was so upset, but still a vast improvement on the previous wake up.

By the third night of this, she was waking just once – obviously realising there was nothing worth waking up for if she wasn’t going to be fed – and before long she was sleeping through from 7pm until 6.30am or even 7am. The elusive 12 hours, which had seemed so, so far out of our reach, achieved without once leaving her to cry herself back to sleep on her own.

It had felt like we would never sleep again. But now all three of us are enjoying a full night’s sleep and it’s wonderful. And we’re even finding that it’s true that ‘sleep breeds sleep’ with babies – since her nights improved, Honor has started napping so much better in the day too. It’s almost like she’s realised how amazing she feels when she’s had enough sleep. We know we certainly do.