Introducing a new bedtime routine with Bubbaroo

When the lovely folks at Bubbaroo heard of our bedtime woes and asked if we would like to work with them on a sleep related project, including access to professional baby sleep experts, I didn’t need to think twice. This is exactly what we needed!

Over the next few weeks we’re going to be trying a new bedtime routine with Taylor, our overall aim is to try and reduce how much he relies on breastfeeding. And stop him from using me to fall asleep before I return to work full time in January.

This week I had my telephone consultation with Infant Sleep Consultants to discuss how we could achieve this which was more helpful than I had anticipated.
In order for Katie at The Baby Sleep Experts to understand what our situation was I had to give a breakdown of Taylors eating and sleeping habits.

By documenting Taylors eating and sleeping habits for four days prior to the consultation we were able to see that he only has one short nap a day, Katie has suggested he needs to have more sleep throughout the day than he is currently getting, this will prevent him from becoming overtired and cranky by bed time. Also giving me more time to drink hot cups of tea and write, I’m certainly willing to try this.

My main focus was to discuss feeding, Taylor goes to bed each night by being breastfed to sleep. My concern has always been what happens when he’s no longer being breastfed? We need to nip this in the bud sooner rather than later!

The other issue we’ve been having aside from the odd couple of night time wakeups, namely due to teething, is him waking each night between going to bed at 8:00pm and 12:00am, and again, my breastfeeding him back to sleep each time.

So, what’s the plan?

I’ve opted to ease into the change rather than the option of placing him in his cot sans-feed and going in to say ‘shhh’ every two minutes and hoping he learns it’s sleep time. I personally don’t think I could handle it!

Phase one 1 –  Rock, don’t feed

To start with we’re going to try and teach Taylor to fall asleep after he’s been fed and not during, this means he’ll still be breastfed at bed time but taken off before he falls asleep to then be rocked to sleep.

If he wakes in the night before 1.30am he isn’t to be fed. Any wake up before then I can give him a few minutes to settle and if he is getting upset go in and rock him back to sleep

I’ll be writing a blog post about phase one after one week to let you all know how we get on, all being well we shall then move onto phase 2 and gradually work way up to a better bed time routine.

Last night was our first night and he took it really well. So exciting!

I’ll also be sharing tweets / Instagram posts of our journey using the tag #BubbarooBabySleepDiary be sure to follow our progress, you never know some of the techniques might help you.

Having breastfed Taylor to sleep for 10 months it’s going to be hard but I can’t wait to take on the challenge, have you found yourself to be in a similar situation, how did you handle it?