Andrea’s Weblog

A few weeks ago Elizabeth was getting up what felt like every hour all night long. Since I refused to wake up enough to count how many times or check the clock, I don’t know exactly how many times she was waking up. All I know is that I would wake up at 9:00 am feeling like I needed another nights sleep. Up until this point, Elizabeth’s night nursing hadn’t really interfered with my sleep, but this spurt of bad nights wore me out. She might have been teething or fighting something off so I couldn’t be mad at her–only frustrated at my lack of sleep. Being pregnant and also having to get up multiple times at night to go to the bathroom made sleep more and more precious. Since having a grumpy mom around the house is nobody’s idea of fun, something needed to change.

We decided to try night weaning her. A week before W-day we started telling her that on Friday there would be “no nursies while you’re sleeping.” We went to the store and she picked out a special night-night cup to have at night when nursies weren’t available. She ended up getting a fever and rash that week, so we had to postpone it to the following Friday. That’s the good thing about toddlers, since she doesn’t have a concept of time, we could just keep telling her the same thing for another week.

Miraculously, the two nights before W-day, she started sleeping for 5-7 hours straight! When W-day arrived, we filled her cup with ice and water and told her that after she fell asleep she couldn’t nurse till morning. I prepared for a sleepless night, remembering friends’ stories of walking the baby around the house for hours until he fell asleep. That night, to my surprise, I got up more often than she did. I think she woke up once around 2 and then around 6:30. The first time she woke I told her she could nurse later and she fell right back to sleep. The second time involved a few squawks, but she fell back asleep without us having to get up.

It’s now been a week and she’s sleeping through the night for the first time ever! She’ll sometimes wake up between 5:30-6:30, squawk a bit, then fall back to sleep. I sometimes wonder if we could have done this sooner, but given that she started sleeping longer just before W-day, I think she was just ready to night wean.