Sleep through the night

How to put baby to sleep/nap and let them sleep for longer is from our opinion, the biggest challenge for new parents.

Some history of how we handled it so far :-

1. First stage: Alyssa slept after her feed. It was so easy. But of course, she woke up often for food.

2. Second stage: She hated pacifier for the first 4 months, so Mami tried so hard to teach her to find her thumbs. Newborn holds their hand so tight and Alyssa managed this when she was 3.5 months old. The first time that Alyssa could sleep for longer than 8 hours was after she learned how to suck her thumbs. Papi and Mami could hear Alyssa sucking her thumb and putting herself back to sleep after waking up. But this didn't happen long. After a while, she stopped sucking her thumb. We don't know why.

3. Third stage: Suddenly, Alyssa liked pacifier when she was 4 months old. Just gave her a pacifier and it was not so difficult to put her to sleep. During that period, when we heard that she was almost awake, we just ran quickly into her room , found her pacifier and stuffed it back into mouth before she was totally wake. That helped us during this stage to get some sleep.


4. Fourth stage: She didn't like her pacifier since she started teething when she was around 6 months old. She didn't like sucking anymore, whenever we gave her a pacifier, it would end up as teether (with the hard plastic from the pacifier), and she would be very busy with chewing this teether and this would make her more awake.

We tried different things during this stage.
4.1 Mami got back to work when Alyssa was 4.5 month old and Alyssa drank very little milk during the day. And for almost two months, as Alyssa really drank too little during the day (sometimes only 80ml for 9 hours during the day) and whenever Alyssa woke up at night, Mami would nurse her, on average, it was twice per night. The nursing chair became Mami's sleeping chair, she slept on it during nurse and then fell asleep there while Alyssa was nursing and subsequently fell asleep as well. When Mami woke up, usually, both of them slept there for 1 hour already. But nursing is indeed not a good solution as baby might get to used to sleep only by nursing.
4.2 We tried the cry-it-out method with Alyssa once. But she couldn't sleep after crying for 2 hours and we even got complaints from neighbour upstairs (they banged on the floor and let us know that they were all awake because of our daughter). So that was indeed a total disaster and didn't work on Alyssa. After this "trauma", we needed to hold and rock Alyssa to sleep and very very lightly put her down in her bed for more than two weeks to gain back her trust and then she became calmer when we put her down to sleep while she was still awake.
4.3 As Alyssa finally drank more during the day time in the day care, when she was about 7 month old, finally, we were back on track again with her bed time routine and putting back to sleep method. In principle, we tried our best to let her fall asleep not in our arms but in her crib. We picked her up when she was crying and angry, but once she went a bit quieter, we would put her down in her own crib, and sometimes, patted her a bit. But the key is that once she is a bit quieter, we said good night and left the room. And gave her some chances to sooth herself to sleep.



NOW:
Since last 2 weeks, she could slept for several nights for 11 hours. We were so happy to see through our baby monitor that she woke up and even got into her crawling position, cried a bit (not too loud nor long) for half minutes to 3 minutes. And then she found a good posture to get back to sleep again. This is so very nice !!!