11 month old, co-sleeping, breastfeeding all night + full time working Mum - ideas?

Hello all!

Please forgive me if this issue has been covered elsewhere on the forum (as I'm sure it has been). I am just waaaay too tired to search :(

I LOVE co-sleeping with my babies. All of them have been in my bed. ATM I have my nearly one year old and my three year old in the bed - Hubby often sleeps in 3yo's bed because even in a King Sized bed it gets crowded, and we end up sore when we wake up. Having said that however, I have recently gone back to work, and I miss them during the day, so despite the challenges I absolutely treasure the time I have with them at night.

My main problem ATM is that DD (almost 1) is up every 2 hours wanting to feed. Does anyone else find this? Is it just because my boobs and I are in such close proximity she smells it and wakes more frequently to feed? I suspect I must wake her with my sleepy noises too at times, and the only way to get her back to sleep is to feed her. I have had pretty serious pnd and anxiety this time during pregnancy and post, so sleep is even more important for me to stay well. My psychiatrist (a perinatal specialist) wants to send me to sleep school and insists that I need to somehow sort out the sleep situation so she wakes less at night - most people say that by this age she should be well and truly sleeping through the night. So here I am, determined to co-sleep (or at the very least employ gentle methods for getting bubba to sleep), working full time in a very demanding job, breastfeeding all night long, totally exhausted, struggling with managing my anxiety, trying to care for 3 children, clean the house, wash the clothes, cook the dinner, make sure bills are paid and all the other stuff that goes with managing family affairs. I should mention at this point that DH is a stay at home dad - but he sees this as mostly child care, and housework is most definately NOT part of his job description (nor does he care if it is done at all for that matter). I need the place to be relatively clean and tidy for my sanity, so I get stuck with doing it all...anyhow I digress.

What I am really after is some ideas re: how I can get more sleep so I can more effectively manage the everyday challenges of life. How do you do it? Do your babies still wake in the night at this age? Is this inevitable with co-sleeping? I can't even remember what the other two did - I think they also woke during the night, but I was much more well and coped better with it...

Any thoughts? Reassurance? Ideas? Reality checks?

dear juliette-

i completely understand how you feel, my DD was exactly the same and up to about 1 week ago she started sleeping through the night, the saddest part is she did it in her own bed she would normally go down in her bed then wake to come into ours but has been sleeping through in her bed and now she is weaned from Bf she is 17mths old now. back when she was 1 though i was finding it really difficult to lay on my side and feed her all night due to my carpel tunnel the pain was extreme so i wasnt sleeping much and although i dont technically work full time i had 5 other children to look after in the day.i was also finding she wasnt actually feeding but rather just wanting to be attatched for comfort sucks.
you are working a double full time job trying to take care of housework and working..i think you need to have a chore chart or something for your Dh listing the 3 or 5 most important chores to do in the day while you are work. listing the actual thing and making a short list might be better recieved then just saying please clean the house, i know my DH has no idea what a clean house entails.

sorry if this reply didnt help i hope it gets better soon sending you lots of hugs and sleep vibes**

Thank you for your reply Shantelle :) I can imagine your day must be very demanding with 5! Even though hubby doesn't do the housework, I still think he has the tougher job with 3 kids! I might try your idea to list just a few tasks for DH to do each day. I guess breaking it down into manageable parts might be more meaningful to him than ranting about "cleaning the house". I guess it is an ambiguous request! lol. We usually put Aimee down in her own portacot (next to ours) and then she comes in with us at about 11pm. I suppose I can hope that she starts sleeping longer on her own...I could try putting her to sleep in the cot in her own room (which our babies have never really slept in for long because I'm a sucker and always end up bringing them in with me).

Sorry for brief reply... I'm toddler-wrangling. Just wanted to say that we've been there. It was EXHAUSTING! Ended up night-weaning at about 13 months using the Jay Gordon method -google should find it for you. Involved less sleep for about 5 nights so pick yr timing, but ultimately meant that we were still co-sleeping but DD was sleeping from about 8-5, waking for one feed then sleeping till 7. More sanity all-round. Hope you get more sleep very soon. Oxo

I have no advice for you sorry. Just a comment on the is it normal/do yours still do this part - I think it is (unfortunately perhaps!). A large number of 1yr olds still wake at night needing some kind of reassurance, whether that be a feed or something else. My 19 month old often breastfeeds 2-3hrly all night long. I think that kind of night feeding can often be increased when mums go back to work too. So you are missing her in the day and therefore treasure the time at night - she is just the same! Wanting that increased contact.

I have no ideas how to make it easier for you though. It must be very tiring! Hugs and sleep vibes to you!

It's perfectly normal and natural. You could consider trying to detach her from the breast before she's asleep, so give her a few sucks and then take her off. I found this reduced dds night wakings. She started sleeping through only when I night weaned her at 18ish months.

It's tough. You're a great mum!!

I used some techniques from the No Cry Sleep Solution that helped to reduce the all night feeding, but we are still feeding at least twice a night. The other thing that helped, and this doesn't really help you (but might give you hope), was just time. It was kinda like all of a sudden, sleep wasn't the completely evil thing it always had been.

Ideas i got from the No Cry Sleep Solution was trying to detach so she wasn't attached all night. It took awhile to work out the right time, at the start i was doing it 7 or 8 times and bub would wake again but now she comes off herself (or i can help detach) and she will just roll over to sleep.

Second was to offer a hug or pat first, many times i would end up feeding anyway, but over time sometimes a back rub will work and she will go back to sleep. I think this has helped to increase the gap in feeds, because i am not offering the boob at every wake up.

If i was really tired or she was, i would go back to just feeding, because it was easiest. When i felt stronger, i felt more confident in trying the different techniques.

I also took one side of her cot and put it up against the bed, and at the begining of each night she would start in the cot. I was able to reach her from the bed, and when she woke she could climb onto our bed (so she didn't feel as restrained as when the cot was complete). I am slowly working on resettling her in the cot after a feed. SOmetimes it works, other times it doesn't, but slowly she is happier to sleep in there for longer periods.

Can you get sleep at other times? Get a lie in on the weekend? Hire a cleaner?

I have also used the NCSS ideas. My baby is a lot younger than yours, but we have had huge success with it. We ony co-sleep sometimes, as we find it doesn't really work that well for our baby. (even though I love it!)

One thing I have to say about the NCSS though is that it's not a quick fix. We have got our little girl to the point where if she does wake for a reason other than hunger, we can verbally reassure her, and re-settle just by shushing. But that took us 11 weeks, and it was 2 or 3 weeks just to get our night wakings down from 10 to 2 or 3 (it's now 1) But I highly recommend it. Just persist.

Our baby is too little for Jay Gordon, but I believe that his methods would work.

Good luck!!

feeding every two hours at 11 months - that was our experience too. day and night.
little stomaches, can't hold much, get thirsty (and need to be changed).

from 12 months, i put DD in the cot (still in my room).
from 18 months, i put DD in the cot (in her room)
whatever thing i tried, she STILL woke and was thirsty every two hours.

apparently "sleeping thru the night" for a young child, actually means "five hours consectutively". We got this at 20 months - every bub is different.

in your shoes, i would be outsourcing every housework chore i could think of (to paid help, helpful family and friends).

• pet walking
• meal making (for freezer batch cooking)
• fresh food buying
• grocery buying
• wet areas cleaning
• clothes washing/ironing (if you need ironed clothes for your work)
• kindy/child care dropoffs and pickups
• taking kids to shops to buy shoes/have haircuts (things you have to do in person)

automate bill paying online

if she's feeding every two hours, are you also putting expressing time into your already very busy day (if she has EBM while you're at paid work). wow, i have no idea how you are managing to do all of this. Just re-read your post, THAT"S how you're coping - you have anxiety - and no wonder, you are doing SOOOO MUCH! I am amazed you do with all with ONE baby, but with THREE? blimey (falls over). I think you're doing well just to be still standing.

Thanks everyone... it's good to know it's not unusual for a baby this age to still be waking so frequently at night. Not many of my friends parent this way, and they think I'm totally crazy. Not to mention my GP and psychiatrist. EVERYONE is telling me that she SHOULD be sleeping through in her own bed. There are so many SHOULDS out there!

I think I will try taking her off the breast sooner than I normally would after she wakes each time to see if I can comfort her with a quick sip instead of the whole milkshake. I have tried the patting thing, and she does use a dummy, but nothing seems to be quite the same as Mummy's warm snuggly milk bar. Speaking of which, she BIT me tonight!!!

all bubs bite, the trick is to learn how to breastfeed so that biting is not possible.

we were in a situation that i was dreading feeding my bub, cos of the biting. i posted about it, and a wonderful BB member talked me thru how to it - AND IT WORKED. She is a ABA breastfeeding counsellor, so knows all about it. It came down to me relearning how to HOLD my baby whilst feeding, POSITIONING her so that my nipple was in her BACK PALATE. I did what the BB member told me to do, and no more biting. I think in the first year of feeding, i had forgotten the early tips i was taught, got a bit lazy, which worked fine, when she had no teeth, but once the teeth came, BOY did i find out all about it!

So, i was amazed how quickly and easily this prob was resolved, by someone in the know, telling me the tricks to making biting impossible. (If bub is effectively "on their back" arching up to feed, they cannot bite DOWN on you. See? )

so HOW i held her (positioning)
and WHERE i put my nipple (in her back palate)
made all the difference.

i am not a bf-ing counsellor, so i doubt the way i have explained it would help you, but i encourage you to ring the aba phone helpline (free) which is 1800 686 2 686 to speak to a bf-ing counsellor. this is such a common problem, seeings as every bub grows teeth eventually!

hth

oh, and as baby grew older, breastfeeding necklace was handy, for distraction value.

you're prolly too exhausted to do much reading, but here is a link for you anyhoo - on bf-ing and working mums:
http://www.breastfeeding.asn.au/bfinfo/hints.html