Our Failing Attempts at Toddler Dream Analysis

“There aren’t going to be any rollers again tonight, ” Cavanaugh said as he walked upstairs to get ready for bed.

Last night, he said, “I’m going to want to talk about the roller again” and the night before that, “There was a green roller by the fan. It came on the bed. There was a white garbage truck.”

Cavanaugh has been having nightmares since he was two months old, but this is the first dream he’s talked about. When his shaking body, fast breathing, and cries in the night started I read about sleep disturbances, trying to figure out what was happening to my son. Though it more closely fit the descriptions of nightmares than night terrors, no source I found even acknowledged that bad dreams could happen that early. Usually, I can just put my hand over his palpitating heart and his breathing slows. Occasionally he wakes up sobbing and needs to be held.

When he woke from this dream, he sat straight up and asked to go to “daddy’s bed,” the guest bedroom where Mike sleeps on nights he works late or on mornings he has to wake up super early. I misunderstood and thought he was asking for Mike to come sleep with us. We woke Mike up and he came in to bed and Cavanaugh fell immediately back to sleep, but the next night before bed, when he said we were going to have to go to daddy’s bed so the roller couldn’t get him, I started asking questions.

Cavanaugh explained the dream over and over, adding more emotional detail each time, his eyes getting wide, his arms waving around to show the roller moving across the bed. Apparently a green steamroller who doesn’t have any friends and is lonely tried to come up on the bed with Cavanaugh the other night. So did a garbage truck that is also not the roller’s friend. Cavanaugh’s prescription for the problem: “We need to find some machines that love him so he won’t be lonely anymore.”

Through many retellings, I still have not discovered what exactly the roller was trying to do to Cavanaugh: roll over him, be mad at him, sleep next to him, be Cavanaugh’s friend? And since Cavanaugh frequently talks about “all the people who love me,” especially since we put the memory board up in his room with pictures of “all the people who love you,” I don’t think this is some projection of himself.

For as long as he’s been having nightmares, he’s never been able to tell me about what happens in them. He hasn’t told me about the happy dreams either. Now that he’s telling me about this dream, I keep feeling like I’m not asking the right questions or saying the right things. This is not me being too hard on myself. I know that he’s benefiting from telling me about them so far, that his asking for reminders before bed the last three nights is a good thing. But I just keep having the feeling I’m missing something.

We’ve talked about how dreams are pictures in our heads and there is no real steamroller coming on the bed. I’ve suggested that he can say, “I don’t like that” in the dream, or “No.” We’ve discussed alternate endings in which a car carrier takes the steamroller to a place with other machines that will be his friends. The dream analysis unit in Psych 101 is not helping me here.  Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Do your kids have bad dreams? When they do, can you talk about them?

Night Weaning Part V: Everything No One Ever Told You About Night Weaning

When I read about night weaning, my main fears were that the weaning itself would be traumatic, that we’d have to move Cavanaugh out of the family bed or he’d never stop nursing at night, or that once partially weaned, Cavanaugh would wean completely. The books and websites introduced more fears I hadn’t even thought of yet. As usually happens, when I started talking to my mama buddies, they told me a lot the books had neglected to mention and they reminded me that different kids have different personalities thus the process will not be the same for everyone, no matter what the books say.

So to compile this list, I asked the mamas what they wish they’d known, both positive and negative, when they were considering night weaning:

General advice:

• Some kids just won’t night wean themselves and the goal of child-led weaning just makes for an exhausted family and a resentful mama.
• “Listen to the little mama voice in your head saying, ‘It’s time.’  Often you will hear it before you actually do it.  Don’t wait too long.  Make the change before you desperately need the change.” Rhonda
• Make sure your child is not hungry in the night. Though s/he doesn’t need food in the sense that his/her stomach is big enough to hold enough for a full night’s nourishment, s/he is used to snacking every couple of hours or so. To help with the transition, big bowls of oatmeal, yogurt, an English muffin with nut butter or some other before-bed snack can help.
• The advice to wait until all of a child’s teeth come in assumes the child wakes a lot because of teething or that all of their teeth will come in on schedule. Many toddlers don’t even notice their two year molars coming in and delaying weaning until after they arrive may means months of interrupted sleep for no good reason.
• You can make up your own rules for night weaning. My friend Emily decided she just wasn’t nursing between bedtime and 4 a.m. A few months after that, they dropped the before bed nursing, then they dropped the 4 a.m. nursing.
• Without nursing, you will need to develop other sleep associations so your child can fall back to sleep without milk. You’ll also need other tools to comfort your child when s/he’s sad, scared, or sick in the night.
• Come up with a plan for what you will do instead of nursing your child back to sleep. Suggestions from Jaimee include holding, rocking, singing, wearing tight fitting clothing, walking, offering snack/water, offering book/movie, partner helping, driving, baby carrier, sleeping in another room, etc..

Exceptions to the Rule

• Some kids are all or nothing folks. They may not understand getting to nurse in the day but not at night. It is possible to completely wean a child in order to stop the night nursing and then at some later point reintroduce milk only at certain times of day as my friend Rhonda did. “starting at 18 months we tried everything to nightwean and ended up completely weaning at two years because uma wasn’t able to incorporate the idea of only nursing during the day.  ~two months later (26 months) we started nursing again in the morning and after nap.  she self weaned two weeks ago (2.8 years.)”
• Some kids just wake up more if someone is next to them. If you want to limit night nursing, you may be able to do so just by moving the child to her own bed rather than having to fully night wean. As my friend Lisa explained,  “Our night weaning occurred as a side effect of moving Lexi out of our bed and into her room at around 12 months.  She was nursing every 45 minutes, all night long, and I couldn’t see how it would be possible to night wean, or even to decrease it, while co-sleeping.  I wasn’t actually planning to night wean.  I was just not getting any sleep at all with the non-stop nursing at night.  After the crib transition, we went very quickly from nursing once in the middle of the night, to going a 5 hour stretch and then 7 and then to all night.  This happened over the course of a week or two.  We didn’t really actively, intentionally night wean.  If she woke, I went in and nursed her and put her back down to sleep.”

Pros of Night-Weaning:

• Once the toddler knows there’s no more milk in the night, they will actually cuddle with you instead of wanting to suck from your body.
• The night wakings stop. Your child will (almost) immediately begin to sleep for long blocks, if not the whole night.
• You and your child will sleep more deeply and will actually begin to have dreams again.
• The night-weaning process is a very short period of time in a long nursing relationship and the relief and rest you feel on the other side are so worth it!
• Once a child is night-weaned, co-sleeping is not a problem for most kids. They know the milk isn’t available and they don’t ask.

Cons:

• Most likely, “There will be tears for a few nights – yours and theirs. ” Rhonda
• Sleep might get worse before it gets better.
• The length of time spent in bed is likely to shorten. When kids are getting more  and deeper sleep because there are no longer night wakings, they don’t sleep as long. Many of my friends noticed a one – two hour shortening of sleep. Essentially, that 6 a.m. nursing that bought you one more sleep cycle is likely to turn into a 6 a.m. wake up.
• Depending on the temperament of your child and how established night weaning is, you may have to night wean all over again if you need to make exceptions for illness, vacations, or other temporary setbacks.

If there’s something you wish you’d been told about night weaning, help another mama out. Tell her here.

In His Own Bed, In His Own Room

While Cavanaugh and I were in NM visiting my family this summer, he started sleeping in his own bed. It freaked me out, made me sad, and proud, and worried, and I watched my getting-so-big boy curled up with all the loveys he could fit next to him and tried not to fret about the ten foot distance between us. I figured it would last throughout the trip, but wasn’t sure what would happen once we got home. It’s been mixed. For the first couple of weeks he wanted to sleep in his special bed. The difficulty with this is that his special bed is his crib mattress.

But he is too big for a crib mattress. He flops around and turns horizontally on the bed. It’s too small for me to lie on to read stories or nurse him to sleep. I’d prop myself on various pillows and try not to be too impatient with the winding down process that was making me so physically uncomfortable. Cavanaugh was clearly in a new stage of development and I knew I should not delay or derail it. He was excited about his bed, showed it to his friends when they came over, but wouldn’t let anyone else play on it.

Then Cavanaugh started waking up in the middle of the night. Sometimes he just needed me to go rub his back or cuddle him back to sleep, but he started wanting to come into the big bed more frequently. Then he started just asking to sleep in the big bed instead of on his special bed.

I’m trying not to have an agenda about his either way. It’s his transition. I love co-sleeping with my son. He’s cuddly. If he gets sick or has a nightmare or needs anything, I’m right there. but if I have to pee in the middle of the night, my getting in and out of the bed sometimes wakes him. If I want to stay up reading or I’m having a hard time falling asleep myself and need to switch positions too often, I wake him. While this used to mean nursing him back to sleep, now it means a rub on the back, maybe a sip of water, and he’s usually back to sleep, so the night waking doesn’t feel like it did when I would roll over and make noise as he transitioned between sleep cycles and he’d wake and want to nurse and I’d be up for 30 minutes instead of the 30 seconds it should have taken to readjust and put myself back to sleep.  When he’s not in the same bed though, I can move around, sleep more deeply, have a little space. Big bed or his own bed, there are pros and cons. Wherever he wants to be is okay with me.

I didn’t want him to be sleeping in the big bed just because his mattress was too small, so I moved the crib mattress into Cavanaugh’s room (so far just used for daytime play and out of town guests) and the twin bed into the master bedroom. He liked having the twin bed, but he still split his time, sometimes starting the night in his bed and staying there all night, sometimes coming to mine halfway through or starting in the big bed and sleeping all night long.

Then this past weekend, we took the curtains down in the master bedroom to fix the rod. So we moved the twin mattress back to Cavanaugh’s room and I slept in there with him for two nights. It was too small, cuddly but crowded. We got the curtains back up last night and slept in the big bed. We haven’t moved the twin mattress back into the master yet. So tonight at bedtime, Cavanaugh said he wanted to sleep in his bed, in his room. I said I would be sleeping in the big bed in my own room. He didn’t hesitate. We went to his room, lay down in the twin bed and I told him if he woke up and needed me, he could just say “Mama” into the monitor and I would come check on him, or he could walk over to my room and get me. We read stories, he nursed, and he fell asleep. I left his lamp on. I think I’ll leave mine on too. I am definitely much more freaked out about this than he is. I’ll let you know how it goes.

How about you? How did you transition your kids to their own beds or their own rooms? Or maybe I should be asking, how did they transition themselves?

Guest Post: How I Night-Weaned My Daughter

Breastfeeding did not come easy for me in the beginning. It took lots of hard work and lots of pain before my daughter and I were in a truly wonderful breastfeeding relationship. So it was not an easy decision for me when I decided that it was time to night wean Emma.

For the first few months after Emma was born, she slept in our room in a bassinet. Then around 4 months of age I finally discovered the benefits of co-sleeping and she moved into our bed. I loved snuggling with her and not having to get up all night long. Around 6 months, Emma began turning over and learning to roll. This made sleeping together more difficult, as she was constantly disturbing me and waking herself up. So my husband and I decided to move Emma to her own crib in her room. I was really sad to have her so far away, but we all immediately began sleeping much better. When she woke up during the night I would go into her room to nurse her. Most nights she only woke up twice and I was able to manage this pretty well.

When she was about 9 months old, she started sleeping through the night the majority of the time. She’d sleep for about 10-11 hours each night. Over the next few months she woke up during the night on occasion, and I would breastfeed her right back to sleep. But around age 14 months, Emma began waking up much more frequently during the night. I believe some of this was due in part to her teething and a cold. Even after the teeth had arrived and the cold was gone, she continued to wake at night. Usually it was just once, and she would very quickly go back to sleep after nursing. I might have been able to continue with this schedule, but her night waking became even more frequent, sometimes she would wake up 3-4 times during the night. I was growing very tired, and resentful that my baby no longer slept through the night. I was feeling extremely frustrated during the day, and I was not able to enjoy time with my daughter.

So I decided that it would best for us both if I night weaned her completely. It would allow me to be more rested during the day and more present in Emma’s life. No one wants a grumpy mama to play with during the day!

Emma turned 18 months on June 30, and on that night I resolved that we would nurse at bed time, and not again until the morning. I did explain to her as I nursed her at bedtime that everyone was going to sleep now. Emma would sleep, Mommy and Daddy would sleep, and the milk would go to sleep. I really don’t think she understood what I was telling her.

When she awoke during the early morning hours I went into her room and tried to comfort her without picking her up. I tried to get her to lie back down in her bed but she became very upset. So I picked her up and took her to the rocking chair. She wanted to nurse so much but I just rocked her. She cried, and cried, and I was frustrated, questioning if I really wanted to do this. But I remained strong. I rocked her, walked her, offered her water, and after about 30 minutes of crying she went back to sleep as I rocked her. Over the next several nights she woke up to nurse but I just sang, rocked, walked, and did anything else to get her back to sleep.

The worst time was on the third night, she was awake for 2 and half hours crying. That was very difficult and I almost nursed her many times. I even brought her to our bed to go to sleep with us, but that didn’t work. Eventually she did go back to sleep and has really adjusted well. After the first week, she hasn’t woken up during the night at all. She’s even sleeping a little longer, from 11-12 hours a night. It was a tough time for us both but now we are getting more rest and I know that she is doing fine without the night time nursing.

Ronda Smith and I met at AP meetings sometime in 2008, maybe 2007. With the kids around it’s hard to think about years anymore. We just count ages and time in months. She and I have crocheted together, chatted about parenting, and watched our kids get much taller. As it turns out, she night weaned when her daughter was six months younger than Cavanaugh, so I thought you mamas with younger kids might like the chance to read her story.

She blogs at http://craftyknittykitty.blogspot.com/

Let Go the Latch

My friend Martha is recording her progress as she weans her daughter from being latched on all night. It’s not exactly night weaning in the sense that Martha’s happy to nurse for night wakings. She just doesn’t want to be that attached a parent. Besides offering helpful strategies, Martha’s funny. Give her Weaning the Human Pacifier series a read.

Photo “Remember III” by theladyportico

Give Me Just One Hour

Right now I am writing while my toddler does puzzles on our “big bed,” a king size mattress on the floor of our master bedroom. Quiet time is that not-so-quiet hour I set an alarm and instruct my son to play by himself while I work across the room. We’ve tried all sorts of configurations: him on his little mattress in the master bedroom surrounded by toys and books, him with free range of the master bedroom as long as he plays by himself and stays relatively quiet–which ultimately means not engaging me in conversation, and him in his room playing with whatever he wants.

My son is the first of his friends to give up nap and anyone I mention this ending to sympathizes as if a real tragedy has occurred. In some ways it has. That hour and a half a day was my sanity saver, a time when I wrote while my brain was still operational, something that is not always true by the time my husband gets home from work and we eat dinner and put Cavanaugh to bed. By then I have been up for 14+ hours and have been on duty with my child just about the entire time. Nap was the one or two hours of any day that I could actually be by myself, have time to think or write and just not attend to another person. Now, if I just bring us upstairs and set the alarm for Quiet Time, I get one miraculous hour.

I know I’ve been missing it when I start to feel strung out and impatient with baskets of toy cars get turned upside down or marker straying off the paper and onto the cheap IKEA table we use for everything from snacks to storytime. Suddenly normal toddler behavior is a major imposition and I realize I have not been writing. Throughout my teenage and adult life I’ve had an inner gauge that starts moving to empty if I have not made time to write. It doesn’t matter what kind of writing it is, poetry, journaling, even a long cathartic email to a friend. My head is not big enough for my thoughts and saying them out loud just stirs up more of those pesky buggers. Whether with pen or keyboard, the voices in my head get transcribed and exorcised or organized.

As an added benefit, if I manage to get a blog post done or work on the draft of something, I feel a huge sense of accomplishment, something more tangible than the early days after Cavanaugh was born when I used my Franklin Covey planner to chart our days, playgroups blocked out like meetings for a specific time of day, dishes done, laundry, a trip to the grocery store, anything to measure my days by, to give me a record of how I spent my time. What does a stay at home mom do all day anyway? Today, Cavanaugh and I made pumpkin muffins, I was hand-cleaner and glue assistant as he adhered pom poms and glitter to paper, I heated up cheesy rice and black beans for lunch, and I wrote for one whole hour

Photo “On Time” by TIME-24

Night Weaning Part IV: Crying Over Unspilled Milk

Nighttime is when our kids get fevers, have nightmares, or otherwise need our help–even though we are sleeping and wish they were too. The key to night weaning is that once you stop offering milk as a panacea for night waking, you need to have some other tools for getting your child to sleep. I held Cavanaugh and sang to him. I bounced, rocked, and walked him. I reminded him that he knew how to sleep through the night, that I was still right there, that if he needed food or water he could have it. He didn’t want anything but breastmilk.

But I could not keep night nursing. I’d gotten to a point where I felt claustrophobic and wanted him off my body almost the moment when he was latched on. I would find myself nursing with my fist clenched (though he couldn’t see it). I wanted to move, to scream, to throw something–including him. I didn’t do any of those things, but my growing distress made me know I had to stop.

I had to psych myself up so much that I spent about fifty hours preparing to lead a meeting on weaning for our local AP chapter. (See the handout here.) Doing all of the research was my way of trying to understand the myriad ways weaning could happen in our household. For a long time, if I even thought about Cavanaugh being weaned I would tear up. I was afraid that if I night weaned him, he might wean himself completely–as some of my friends’  kids did after various forms of partial weaning.  I was attempting to make peace with the possibility that if I ended night nursing, it wouldn’t be long before he wasn’t nursing at all. I had gotten to the point where night nursing was so uncomfortable for me that even if it meant the end of our breastfeeding relationship, I had to stop it.

Reading about weaning helped me understand that the attachment parenting principle of feeding with love and respect didn’t include feeding with resentment and impatience. I was giving Cavanaugh a mixed message by offering him something that I didn’t really want to give. Martyring myself is not an example I want to set for my son, nor do I want him to ever feel guilty for taking something I am giving him–especially breastmilk. And I couldn’t just reframe the situation or change my expectations. I did not want him to nurse during the night and the thought that our beautiful nursing relationship of two years would turn into something negative made me determined to make a change.

I had originally resisted the Jay Gordon method because he explains that your child may not like being night weaned and might cry, scream, and otherwise protest the process. Luckily, he also explains the difference between crying-it-out and having a crying child. Nevertheless, it was painful to feel Cavanaugh’s desire and not meet it, to feel his sadness and not offer what he was asking for. The idea of “crying-it-out” was getting in the way of my letting Cavananugh cry. He had every right to be sad and to express his feelings of loss around night nursing.

If I had just tried the Gordon method initially and dealt with all of these tears, I could not have continued, but since I had originally said “no more milk” one night out of desperation and he had been night weaned so easily before all of the exceptions, I knew this was not a need he was expressing, it was a want. I didn’t just want to stop night nursing. I needed to. So there were tears at our house, negotiations. Cavanaugh tried asking “for just a little bit” of milk, or saying “milk not sleeping.” Some nights included an hour awake at 4 a.m. while he cried, fell asleep on my shoulder, woke up and cried some more. Other nights, he nursed to sleep and slept through the rest of the night. Though Gordon tells parents that after a child is night weaned you can nurse if circumstances call for it and then spend a night or two getting back on track, that wasn’t the case at our house.

We night weaned. Cavanaugh cried some. So did Mike and I. But we didn’t stop being nighttime parents and Cavanaugh knew that even though I was saying “no” to him about breastmilk, he could still trust me to be there and to meet his needs. I explained to him through nights and tears that we both needed to sleep through the night, that this was a big change, but we could both do it. And we are doing it. And it was so worth it!

Next up, last in the night weaning series Part V: Everything No One Told You About Night Weaning

Night Weaning Part III: Milk Bar Closed Unless…

Originally uploaded by molossoidea

Night Weaning is not a one way milestone, accomplished and never thought of again. Backsliding and challenges will complicate your child’s major accomplishment, will interrupt your newly found full night’s sleep. Teething,  illness, house-guests, the teenager across the street blaring hip hop from his souped up car speakers, repainting your bedroom and needing to sleep in the spare bedroom for a few nights (yes, I realize this was ill-advised) all complicate night weaning.

After Cavanaugh was initially night-weaned, if he woke in the middle of the night with any kind of extenuating circumstances, the voices in my head told me that all those antibodies in my milk would help the virus go away faster, that if Cavanaugh was sobbing because I wasn’t giving him milk, the cold was traveling into his chest and lungs. They said that his poor little mouth was aching from molars trying to push through his gums and my milk would comfort him. I did not want to be up for an hour in the middle of the night because a house-guest flushed the toilet at the exact moment Cavanaugh was transitioning between sleep cycles. Nor did I want to wake up everyone else in the house when he cried because I refused his request for milk. So on each of these occasions, I made myself into a liar. The milk I told him was sleeping was now awake–even though the sun was not.

Now Cavanaugh knew not to believe me when I said the milk was unavailable. He figured if he just asked enough times or cried loud enough, the milk would wake up. The adrenaline rush of panic I experienced in thinking he might not go back to sleep or that he was crying and I was not somehow making it stop kept me from going back to sleep even when he did. Nights when he offered a loud protest but then rolled over to hug his pillow and close his eyes left me reading a book by lamplight, hoping the sound of pages turning would not wake him again.

So, just as I advised in when I first started writing about night weaning that you evaluate your reasons for night weaning or extra sleep disruptions before you get started, I would recommend that you make a plan for what happens when your night-weaned child is unable or unwilling to go back to sleep. Will you offer milk in emergencies? What will you do the next night when the emergency is over but your child still wants to nurse to sleep?

Sleep disruptions (that wouldn’t have been a big deal if you could just whip out your boob and suckle that child into slumber) morph into trials in which you will take the testimony of your crying child and mount your own argument, the one that offers evidence of how much better a mother you are when you are rested. You will tell yourself (and your child) how much more energy you have to run after him while he plays, or that you didn’t get that impatient tone when she refused to have her diaper changed. Your resilience is back. You don’t need a video in the morning to keep your child occupied while you ingest caffeine. You are having dreams again, reaching an REM state you haven’t seen since those pregnancy naps that felled you in your second trimester. You don’t want to go back.

But your child is crying. If you are an AP mama who swore never to use cry-it-out techniques, life has become incredibly complicated. If I’d known that an exception here or there would actually be harder on my son (and me and my husband) than refusing milk and using alternate means to get Cavanaugh to sleep, I might have stayed the course. Or I might have given in to my desire to help my sick or hurting or awake son by nursing him back to sleep and still had to deal with the horrible nights that followed.

Next up, Night Weaning Part IV: Crying Over Unspilled Milk

Night Weaning Part II: What Happens After You Tell the Boy to Sleep Through the Night

After I told Cavanaugh that he, the milk, and I were all going to start sleeping through the night, it took less than a week for us to start getting full nights of sleep. The first night, I started weaning without having planned it in advance. Cavanaugh woke at 3:30 and wanted to nurse for a long time. I was so tired of nursing at night. I said the milk was sleeping and he panicked, so I said the milk would wake when the sun wakes up so he could drink more milk when it was light outside. He rolled over and went to sleep. What? He’d never gone to sleep during the night without nursing before. I realized I’d never told him that sleeping through the night is an actual goal or that if the milk goes to sleep it’s not going away forever. I lay awake wondering if it was possible that I’d suffered through night waking for months and it really could have been this easy all along.

The next night Cavanaugh slept an eight hour block. When he woke at 5:30, I said the milk was still sleeping. He asked to eat. I figured that he might really be hungry since he was used to the milk but was afraid he’d wake up all the way if we went downstairs to eat. I nursed him, said the milk needs to go to sleep now, and he rolled over and went back to sleep. He woke at almost 7 and it was light out. He nursed but would not go back to sleep. Oh, the downside of saying we could be up with the sun. That day I told some friends while we were at a birthday party that Cavanaugh was practicing sleeping through the night and letting the milk sleep through the night. Throughout the party, he kept pointing to the sky, saying “sun” and “sleep.”

Our third night, Cavanaugh slept six hours then woke at 3:51 nuzzling to nurse. He said “eat eat” and I asked if he wanted milk or if he was hungry. He was hungry. We went downstairs, got a bowl of yogurt by frig light, brought the yogurt up to the bedroom to eat by lamplight. I was so afraid he’d wake up fully. When he finished his yogurt, he got back in bed. I reminded him the milk was still asleep until the sun woke up. He rolled over and went to sleep without nursing! On top of that, he slept until 9 a.m. The Promised Land!!!

Our fourth night, Cavanaugh told his Daddy about sun, sleep, milk, and practicing. Cavanaugh didn’t go to sleep until 10:45. Was it because we didn’t get home from errands until 7, were vacuuming before bedtime and he was excited, or because he’s upset about milk sleeping?  He woke at 3:45. Was upset milk was sleeping. I told him I had water by the bed if he was thirsty or crackers if he was hungry. He wanted to go back downstairs for yogurt. I do not want to establish a new middle of the night meal. I want Cavanaugh to learn to eat more during the day and right before sleep.

Cavanaugh loved the middle of the night yogurt. It was this special time where he got carried downstairs in my arms, sat in my lap while I fed him the yogurt. He was too sleepy and it was too messy and I didn’t want to deal with changing pajamas. This was not a good practice, none of it. If I had it to do over, I would have planned for the middle of the night hunger and had a banana or a piece of bread that Cavanaugh could have eaten if he insisted he was hungry in the night. I would not have created a sleep association where we had to go anywhere for food, turn any lights on, or share something that could be felt as a special nursing time he might get attached to. He reacted with more sadness to the loss of yogurt than he did to my initially having said the milk was sleeping.

Stay tuned for Night Weaning Part III: Milk Bar Closed Unless…

Night Weaning for Attached Parents and Other Sleep Deprived Mamas Part 1

I mentioned night weaning in a post recently and a reader asked for any help or advice I might have to give. As she pointed out, all kids are different, so I offer this knowing that what worked for us may not work for you. But I offer this series of posts on night weaning in hopes that it will help keep mamas from being resentful night nursers and children from having a hard core night weaning experience because his/her parents are so exhausted they  just can’t take it anymore.

A week after Cavanaugh turned two, I started night weaning. A lot of my friends did it earlier, but I wasn’t as disturbed by night waking as many mamas I knew. We were bedsharing so Cavanaugh never cried when he woke up and I never came to a fully alert state. Beyond that, he usually only nursed for five minutes so I could fall back to sleep pretty quickly. But then he went from waking every 3 -4 hours back to his previous pattern of waking every 1 1/2 – 2 and I got cranky. I felt like I wasn’t being as good a mom to him during the day because I wasn’t getting enough sleep at night. So I decided to night wean. It was actually my second attempt.

When I first tried to night wean, Cavanaugh was 13 months old and was waking hourly and nursing for long stretches. I was so sleep deprived that I didn’t take full stock to realize it wasn’t the night nursing that was making it feel as if my breasts were about to be sucked off my body. It was Cavanaugh teething (something new since he didn’t cut his first tooth until right before his first birthday). So, my first piece of advice is that if you’re thinking of night weaning, analyze what my be causing sleep disruptions besides nursing. Even if my attempts to night wean had been successful at that point, he would have been waking up just as frequently because he was in pain.

Now Cavanaugh was two, wasn’t teething, and many of his friends had quit night nursing when my mama buddies used the Jay Gordon Method. I read it and couldn’t imagine it working for our family. The seven hour block seemed arbitrary, especially since Cavanaugh can’t tell time. I decided that anytime before I actually got in bed and fell asleep myself (since Cavanaugh usually went to sleep at least two hours before I did), I would nurse. Once I was asleep in the bed next to him, however, there would be no more nursing until daylight.

One of the things I found most helpful was the assurance in The Baby Sleep Book that once my child was past 18 months old, his receptive vocabulary would allow him to understand more of my explanation of what we were doing and why. The first thing I realized was that I’d never told Cavanaugh that sleeping through the night was even a goal. So, I explained that though we’d been waking up during the night his entire life, his body was bigger now and his belly would hold enough milk for him to sleep through the whole night. Instead of milk in the night, he needed to get big blocks of uninterrupted sleep so he’d have enough energy to play and grow. (Maybe too much explanation, but he was listening so I kept talking).

The other big communication piece was explaining that the milk needed to sleep too. I made the mistake of telling Cavanaugh the milk was going to sleep without telling him it was going to wake back up. He experienced a panic akin to separation anxiety. It worked much better when I explained that the milk was sleeping at night just like he and I were sleeping, and the milk would wake up when the sun woke up and it was light outside again. He clung to “sun woke up” as a call to nursing throughout night weaning. He sometimes still says it.

Stay tuned for Part II of Night Weaning: What Happens After You Tell the Boy to Sleep Through the Night