Ok here we go… first the disclaimer. I did not plan to co-sleep, or plan on having an all night nurser, and it happened twice. I’m guessing it had more to do with me than the types of babies we had. That said, we had Ero in a separate bed early on, but he still wanted to nurse all night so we co-slept him too.

Many parents have babies that sleep through the night by the time they are 6 months. Most babies sleep through the night by the time they are walking. Most are even weaned by the time they are walking. Not us! Nooo….

We kept hoping they would naturally stretch out their night feedings more and more, but instead both woke up every 2 hours to nurse. Some women can sleep through this kind of nursing. I could not. It was hard. If I had a day job we would not have chosen this rather sleepy path. I napped with the kids a lot. I went to bed at 9:00p.m.

The good news is we are finally sleeping soundly. Three years of poor sleep (we had back to back kids) probably did a number on my mental function, but I’m ok with how we did it. I also might be crazy as I type this.

Anyways, here’s what we did:

First, our daughter Lou, I read a lot of information on baby sleep. I learned that a good time to night wean the all night nurser is when they are 18 months old. So we waited for Lou to be 18 months and did it. We told her before bed time that we were not going to nurse all night, that nursing needed sleep too. Then we nursed her right before sleep time and told her “Nursing goes night night.” Then we tickled her back until she fell asleep. The first night she woke up pissed but we stayed pretty still and told her that nursing was sleeping. Then she woke up less the second night, and the third even less. By the time 5 days went by she was sleeping all night. I was blown away at how easy it was. I told Peter “Why didn’t we do this earlier?”

With Ero we tried much earlier to night wean. This did not work. We tried the No Cry Sleep Solution and all of Dr.Sears advice. It just didn’t work. Our doctor told us about graduated cry it out, which really didn’t sound that bad. We talked it over and as tired as we were we opted to just do the same thing we did with Lou… to wait.

At 16 months he was understanding a lot more and I was going crazy with sleep deprivation. So we tried it two months earlier than Lou. We already had done the hardest part: Ero was happily falling asleep next to his dad with no nursing for a couple months already. So when it came time to stop nursing we made sure he was well fed and when he woke up that first night to nurse I told him “nursing sleeping.” He was pissed. He was pissed all night off and on. It was pretty hard. The next night I stopped trying to talk him down and just stayed quiet and near him. This worked much better (different kids, different needs.) Four nights later he’s sleeping through the night.

I hadn’t read many stories like mine, yet I currently have two friends with very similar stories themselves.

I hope all of you parents reading this are sleeping well these days. If you aren’t because of the little ones, don’t fret, you’ll get there on whatever timeline works for you.

If any of you have some tips for mom’s going through this, please post.