How I Got My Baby Sleeping Through The Night by Week 12

This is a guest post submitted by Stacy Karol. Mother to one boy who rules the house and co-author of The Dream Feed Method

Hours after our son was born, my husband and I sat in the delivery room debating what to name him. One of those names was ‘Henry’, which means: “Ruler of the house.” I chuckled to myself, thinking: could there be a more fitting name for a baby?

We didn’t end up naming him Henry (though I still adore that name). But now that he’s a clumsy 18-month old who’s just recently learned to employ all octaves of his voice, it’s plain to see that he is in many ways the ruler of this house. Why else would I willingly scrape dried sweet potato from the kitchen floor?

But there is one area of our little lives in which I totally rule. Ever since our son was just ten weeks old, he has slept twelve hours a night. Every night. This has meant that between the hours of 6:30 pm and 6:30 am, our home (and our lives) feel a little bit more ours. This is a concept I could not have fathomed seventeen short months ago, when I was in the throes of early motherhood and holding on for dear life.

People warned me about the sleepless nights, but nobody talked about what that would mean for my days, which I floated through in a jet-lagged state (minus any epic tales from international travel). The sleep deprivation had taken a toll on even the simplest of pleasures: dinner table conversation with my husband and…Netflix. But, just four weeks in, all of that started to change – For the better.

With our one-month old son healthy and steadily gaining weight, my husband and I embarked on six weeks of sleep training using the Dream Feed Method. What I knew was that this approach would get our son sleeping twelve hours by twelve weeks, without ‘crying it out.’ What I didn’t know was that this would also bring my husband and I closer together as co-parents – an incredible side effect, which we’re still reaping the benefits of.

The Dream Feed Method is simple in concept, but it does require a little bit of pre-planning and a commitment to consistency. It’s modeled around four key steps:

1. Start in the first four months. Somewhere around the end of the fourth month, babies settle into a routine that imprints itself, becoming a baseline pattern that they will naturally gravitate to for the next several years. You want that pattern to be a nice long night’s sleep.
2. Introduce Top-Up Bottles. Babies tend to sleep longer if their belly is full (simple, right?). Yet, commonly mothers’ milk supply drops in the evening hours. So add a bottle of expressed milk or formula after that last feed of the day. Your baby will take only as much as she wants, and it will set her up for a longer stretch of sleep. (Bonus: this is a great way for your partner to get involved in the bedtime routine)
3. Pre-empt Crying with Dream Feed. Shortly before your baby is likely to wake for a feed, you’ll smoothly lift him from his crib and gently tickle his upper lip with the nipple of the bottle (while a little trickier, this can also be done while breastfeeding). He’ll instinctually open his mouth and begin sucking. Many babies can take a full feed while still ‘sleeping,’ which makes the put-down a piece of cake.
4. Dream Feed slightly earlier each night. This is where the magic happens. Instead of simply hoping your baby sleeps a little longer with each feeding until you magically win the “my baby is a great sleeper” lottery, you’re going to actively guide him. You’ll consistently nudge that dream feed earlier and earlier until it folds into the feeding before it.
   

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The Dream Feed Method is based on the approach of Jana Hartzell, a well-known night nurse with a tender and common-sense approach to sleep training. During her career, she successfully helped hundreds of parents get their babies to sleep through the night. Ready to give it a try? You can order the book on Amazon.

The Dream Feed Method provides a plan for parents to get their child sleeping from dusk ‘til dawn within the first four months of baby’s life without “crying-it-out”.