A friend of mine who had a baby in January just posted that her baby slept from 9:30 last night until 7:30 this morning. When I expressed my envy, she was shocked to hear that Brendan's not sleeping straight through the night. Another of my friends informed me that her baby (a month younger than Brendan) was sleeping through the night from about 3 weeks old.
What the hell am I doing wrong? I'm doing demand feeding, basically because most everyone says that the Babywise method (or any other method involving scheduled feedings) leads to babies who are undernourished, dehydrated, and failing to thrive. And yet people keep asking me if I'm letting him "cry it out" at night. It seems like the two things are incompatible; how can I feed him when he wants it during the day and yet deny him a feeding at night? I've been hoping that one night he'll just, I don't know, not wake up until morning. Without my having to ignore his crying. Because I can't stand the crying, let me just say. It raises my blood pressure and makes me feel frantic, like I should be doing everything possible to get him to stop crying. If I let him cry, I generally end up crying myself. I've tried not responding to him right away at night, but he seems to get more and more agitated and awake, rather than giving up and going back to sleep. He doesn't seem to be into self-soothing. Now, there are times when I put him down while he's still somewhat awake, and he'll sort of croon to himself for a while and then fall asleep, but that doesn't seem to apply to when he wakes up, just when he's falling asleep after a feeding. Also, I think one cause of his waking is gas, and I don't know what to do about that at all. I've tried Mylicon, and it doesn't seem to do much good. I tried gripe water, and it seemed to make things worse.
So I don't know what to do. I feel like I must be doing things wrong, since everybody's babies are sleeping through the night but mine.
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