Set your goals

Before you start, be clear on your sleep training goals. Are you aiming for your baby to sleep through the night, fall asleep independently, or take longer naps? Once your goals are set, choose a sleep training method that fits your parenting style and feels manageable within your shared space. Options include the SleepLady Shuffle, the Ferber method, more gradual approaches, etc.

Set up the bedroom

Creating a room that works for both you and your baby is key. Think about ways to minimize distractions and promote a sleep-friendly environment:

Crib

Move the crib as far away from your bed as possible. We want as much space as possible between you and baby. Even moving the crib to the end of the bed is preferable to having it by the side of your bed.

visual barrier

Create a “visual barrier” so that your child cannot see you from their crib. This becomes especially important when your child can stand up in the crib. Here are some ideas:

• Use a room divider
• Use furniture, large plant
• Hang a sheet
• Put a free standing coat rack and hang many things, etc.

Sound machine

Use a white noise machine to block out disruptions. You can also use a humidifier or a fan, but having constant background noise will reduce the chance of waking up each other when you are in bed and prevent baby from waking up when you come in and out of the room.

Dark room

Use blackout curtains to keep the room dark when baby is sleeping.

Sleep training at bedtime vs. middle of the night

At bedtime, use the sleep training method you chose as intended. For example, if you’re doing the Shuffle, follow the typical positions. If you’re using the Ferber method, leave the room between intervals as instructed. However, during middle-of-the-night wake-ups, you can adapt to the room-sharing setup. Instead of leaving the room completely, return to your bed to wait out the intervals, or, if you’re using the Shuffle, support your kiddo from your bed once you are further from the crib at bedtime. This approach allows you to remain consistent with the method while accommodating the realities of sharing a room.

More tips for success

Here are some other tips when room sharing:

• Consider sleeping in a different room for the initial stages of sleep training.
• Fake sleep: Pretend to sleep to signal it’s time for your baby to rest.
• Be patient: it may take a bit longer to see progress, but with consistency and repetition, your baby can learn to sleep independently!

Room sharing doesn’t have to mean sleepless nights. With a clear plan and a commitment to consistency, you can teach your baby to sleep independently while sharing the same space. If you need support to create a tailored plan for your unique situation, we can help. You can learn more here. Reach out and schedule an initial call to get started. Together, we can find a solution that works for your family so you can all get more rest!

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In the first few months, babies love to contact nap! Here are some tips to help them take some naps on their mattress. This is a big transition and it may take some patience and time! When you make changes to naps, start with the first nap of the day, as it is usually the easiest time for baby to fall asleep. Once baby is asleep, place her on the mattress. You may need to wait a few minutes to make sure baby will stay asleep when you lay them down. Experiment with waiting for different amount of time, as each baby is different.

When you lay her down, keep your hand on her for a little while to make sure she stays asleep. If she wakes up as soon as you lay her down, you may need to take a more gradual approach. Consider how your baby is currently falling asleep. If baby is used to falling asleep on your chest “vertically” with their head on your shoulder, or in the carrier, that is a big change to go from sleeping vertically on you to sleeping horizontally on the mattress. We can break it down in smaller changes to help baby adjust more easily to each step. Here are some examples. Start with helping baby fall asleep in your arms more horizontally. Then, you can have baby fall asleep on your lap a few times. Baby is still on you, but we are teaching baby to sleep on their back–as if they were on a mattress–and further from your chest. Once baby has had a few naps on your lap, then try the mattress.

Once you’ve made some progress with the first nap, use the same approach for the second nap, and so on. Naps tend to become harder as they day goes. The last nap of the day is usually the hardest, and you may need to keep it as a contact nap to make it happen!

Pro Tips:

• When you lay her down asleep, let her bottom touch the mattress first. Then slowly lay 1 shoulder down and then finally lay her on her back. The top of our back is sensitive, and we want it to be the last part of the body to hit the mattress.
• As babies get older, babies become more sensitive to the environment. Offer naps in a dark room with white noise.

Transition to crib

When you are ready to move baby from a bassinet to their crib, start with playing in the crib during the day. When baby is in a good mood and not tired, put baby in the crib with the lights on in the bedroom. We want baby to have “fun” in the crib, so you may need to play with her. Bring a toy, make silly faces, play peek-a-boo, sing a song, etc. Play for 2-5 min, and then get her out. Repeat several times before baby starts to sleep in the crib. Next, start to do some naps in the crib, starting with the first nap of the day. Once you’ve done a few naps, you are ready to do bedtime in the crib!

Pro Tips:

• you can sleep on the crib fitted sheet for a few nights. That way your baby will smell you when they are in the crib!
• If your baby is not rolling yet and the crib feels very big, you can place baby along the short side of the crib so that baby can be close to 3 sides. Being close to 3 sides will feel familiar!

If you have any questions about your child’s sleep and would like more support, head over HERE to learn more about how we can work together to improve sleep or contact me.

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What is a dreamfeed?

A dream feed is when you feed your kiddo while they’re asleep. While your baby is completely asleep, you go in, pick her up and offer a feeding (just like you usually do at night).

To be clear, if your kiddo wakes up in and you respond by feeding her, that’s not a dreamfeed -even if she falls asleep during the feeding. It’s a night feeding, but not a dreamfeed. A dreamfeed is when WE initiate the feeding while baby is asleep.

How do we do a dreamfeed?

Just like you would do any night feeding! Pick her up, sit in the chair that you typically sit in to do the night feeding. You can nurse or offer a bottle.

She may wake up slightly when you pick her up. But hopefully she will easily go back to sleep while eating. And at the end of the feeding, put her back on the mattress.

Why would we take the risk of waking up a sleeping baby? We often spend so much time and effort to get our babies to sleep, and now I am suggesting we disrupt their sleep? Well, when a dreamfeed actually works, it’s not disruptive and it brings more sleep.

Here are some scenarios when it can be very beneficial to use dreamfeeds:

To align baby’s sleep with ours

As babies get older, their first stretch of the night is often their longest sleep. After that first stretch, they may wake up more frequently throughout the night. Let’s say baby sleeps from 7 pm to midnight, which means that they do a 5-hour stretch. If you go to bed at 7 pm yourself, then you also get five hours of sleep. But if you go to bed at 10 pm, then you’re only getting two hours of sleep before baby wakes up at midnight for a feeding. We can offer a dreamfeed before you’re ready to go to bed around 10 pm. Baby will have a full belly at 10 pm and we can expect her to start her 5-hour stretch at 10 pm. So there would be a feeding before bedtime before 7 pm, a dreamfeed around 10 pm and then the next feeding should be around 3am – because that’s five hours after that 10 pm dreamfeed. In this scenario, we’re not asking baby to go longer between feedings, we are just shifting the timing of the longer stretch to align it with your own bedtime so that you can get more sleep!

To provide consistency during sleep coaching

Dreamfeeds can also be very useful when we are helping baby learn to sleep more independently, while maintaining some night feedings. (often people think that sleep training requires to eliminate all night feedings, but that’s not the case!)

Let’s say we want to do 1 feeding/night around 2 am. That means that we want baby to learn to fall asleep independently and sleep through the night, expect for 1 waking/feeding around 2 am. In this scenario, if kiddo wakes up at 11 pm, we would help her go back to sleep without a feeding (because the feeding time is 2 am). When she wake up around/after 2 am, she would get to eat right away.

Getting to eat *sometimes* can get confusing and inconsistent for kiddos: sometimes she wakes up and gets to eat (around 2 am), sometimes she has to go back to sleep without a feeding (any other time she wakes up). However, since babies can’t tell time, our 2-am rule may feel “random”. From their perspective, sometimes they get to eat, sometimes they don’t, and that feels inconsistent. And when children perceive that we are inconsistent, they often continue to wake up throughout the night to see how we will respond this time.

One way for us to be consistent in the way we respond during sleep training is to provide that feeding as a dream feed. So at some point in the night, we would offer a dreamfeed. Then every time baby wakes up, we can respond consistently (without a feeding), because we took care of the calories through a dream feed. This is a technique that I use a lot during coaching.

Is the dreamfeed working?

When assessing if a dreamfeed is working for your kiddo, here are some questions I ask:

• Is baby getting a good feed during the dreamfeed. If they don’t eat much, then it won’t help them sleep longer.
• How easy is it to put baby down after the dreamfeed. If a dream feed works, baby would  wake up slightly, feed and go back to sleep easily. If you find that your kiddo wakes up during the dream feed and then is upset or it’s hard to put baby down afterwards, then that might not be a tool for your family.
• How is baby sleeping after the dreamfeed?

Those are the things that we want to keep an eye on to assess whether the dream feed is helpful or not.

If you introduce a dream feed, try for 3-4 nights in a row to see what happens. For some families it’s a game changer, for others it doesn’t seem to help. But you can’t know if you don’t try!

If you have any questions about your child’s sleep and would like more support, head over HERE to learn more about how we can work together to improve sleep or contact me.

You can also join my free private Facebook group for sleep support.

The post Using Dreamfeeds for More Sleep appeared first on Slumber Time Solutions.

Discuss and decide ahead of time where everyone will sleep so that bring what you need and/or the host can prepare the rooms accordingly (bed, crib, pack and play, making the room dark, etc.).

If your child will sleep in a pack and play during your trip, put it up at home before your trip. Let your child play with it during the day, use it for a nap in or even at bedtime. We want them to become familiar with it before they actually have to sleep in it in a new place as part of your baby sleep training.

Bring what you need

Take what you need so that you can recreate as much of your bedtime routine and your home sleep environment. You may also want to bring your baby monitor.

Make sure you bring your child’s lovey, pacifier, white noise, blanket, sleep sack, stuffed animal, pajamas, fitted crib sheet, etc. Don’t wash anything (pajamas, blanket, sheet, etc.) right before you leave for your trip: we want these familiar objects to smell like home, which will be comforting in the new environment.

Help your child get familiar with the new sleep environment

As soon as you arrive at destination (and before it’s time to sleep), spend some time in the room where your child will be sleeping. Play in that room, play in their bed/crib/pack and play, and let them know that this is where they will sleep.

What if they don’t sleep like at home?

If your child has a hard time falling asleep and/or staying asleep because they are in a new environment, they may need some extra baby sleep training support at the beginning. You may want to stay with them in the room at first, offering some reassurance using your voice or your touch. If you have to provide more support than you do at home, let them know that this is special because you are on vacation, and that once you get home, you will go back to the “home expectations”.  And do just that as soon as you get home.

The first night you get back home, we have to go back to how we do things at home. That’s really important. If you’ve done things differently on your trip, you can expect him to “test” that, but we need to be very clear about the “sleep rules” at home. Kids are amazing at “compartmentalizing” and understanding that different places/people have different “rules” – for example they behave differently at daycare than at home, or with grandma, etc. What’s important is that as soon as you get back to your home, you use the same sleep rules than you did before the trip.

Schedule

It can be challenging to maintain your child’s regular naptime and bedtime while traveling. Try to find the balance between doing the activities you want to do while on vacation and avoiding that your child gets too overtired and completely melts down, thus not making things fun for anyone. For example, if you know that you will be staying up late one evening, make sure that your child as a good afternoon nap that day. Similarly, if you will be on the go all day, plan to have an early bedtime that night. Follow your child’s lead and adjust your plans accordingly.

Traveling across time zones

If you travel to a new time zone, try to start living as per the new clock as much as possible as soon as you arrive, including meals and snacks, naptime, bedtime, wake time. Expose your child to daylight in the morning and early afternoon. Having said that, it can take a few days to adjust to the new time, so you also want to watch your child: if they are falling apart prior to their schedule as per the clock, follow their lead. People often say that that it takes 1 day of adjustment for every hour of time change. You may want to keep the first day pretty light so your child has the chance to adjust.

Ready for your family to sleep better? Head over HERE to learn more about how we can work together or  Contact me.  

You can also join my free private Facebook group for sleep support.

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