Sunday, February 19, 2012

Happy Dance (Sleep is Good!)

I've been thinking about this for awhile now.
Night-weaning my Poppet.
Something to do with sleep (that's a biggy) and those tiny little white things called 'teeth'.
Most particularly, my Poppet's teeth. My Sprocket is quite fond of telling the world that "Ghee has shaaa-arp teeth," and speaking from experience, so does the Poppet.
During the day she's pretty good when she's feeding about not sinking them in too deep.
This is not the case at night. As she gets sleepier the teeth get deeper, and to be honest, they don't need to get that deep to have me worried.
From about 2 or 3 in the morning my Poppet is of the opinion that a nice, long, comforting sleep feed is the ticket. We have had many debates about this. "Mummy's tired sweety. Let's wait till morning."
"Milk! More! Mama!" (Repeat with growing desperation for 3 or 4 hours.)
As her cot is attached to our bed without a separating bar it is easy for her to search for her milk and yank away all obstacles. There are nights I feel like a Victorian Virgin clutching at my Pyjama top and whimpering "Noooo. Let's just sleep. Honest, sleep is good."
And last night we finally did it. We got through the night with no sleep feeds AND she only woke once and after only the briefest questing and flailing of hands, she went back to sleep. (It is possible that I threatened to move her all of a foot over to Daddy's side of the bed.)
The night before? Ah. That was a different story. Not a lot of sleep that night. But no milk either. So that's two nights in a row. And we might (might) have cracked it.
We did a similar thing with my Sprocket, albeit at a slightly younger age. When he was 13 months and I was pregnant and he was feeding all night and I was like a zombie we went cold turkey and in 3 nights he was over the night feeds. Although that all went caput when the Poppet came along and suddenly it was milk-city.
Sleep. Uninterrupted sleep. Oh, how I love you!
How I'll feel in another year or so when my Poppet stops nursing for good... I don't know.

How did your weaning go?

2 comments:

  1. My kids eventually decided that sleeping thru the night without feeding was good

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  2. Just like that? Wow. Now that's the way to go. My two have not been quite so easy! xx

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