My newborn sleeps thru the night without sleep training – this is how!

EPISODE 240: My newborn sleeps thru the night without sleep training - this is how!

Andrea:
Now I have to tell you that I have always been a mom who has stunk at baby sleep. I am great at infant potty training, definitely check me out at Go Diaper Free. I will teach you how to potty train your baby from birth. I'm great at that, but I am terrible at sleep, or rather, I used to be.

Nicole:
Hello, and welcome to the Go Diaper Free podcast. I'm your host, Nicole Cheever, Go Diaper Free certified coach, and mama to three kiddos who all went through EC and potty training at different ages and stages.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Nicole Cheever with Go Diaper Free, and this is episode 240, My Newborn sleeps thru the night without sleep training. This is from a YouTube video that Andrea posted on her channel not too long ago. Baby Marilyn, baby number six, started sleeping through the night at three months old without any sleep training. It has been so awesome. We wanted to bring it to you here on the podcast. When you're done listening, please head over to godiaperfree.com/240. You'll find the show notes there, the transcript and links to everything Andrea's going to mention that helped her out. Without further ado, here's Andrea.

Andrea:
Hey, guys. Andrea here. I am a mom of six babies. My newborn is three months old now and I finally got her to sleep through the night. In this video, I'm going to share with you exactly how I did that. Now I have to tell you that I have always been a mom who has stunk at baby sleep. I am great at infant potty training. Definitely check me out at Go Diaper Free. I will teach you how to potty train your baby from birth. I'm great at that, but I am terrible at sleep, or rather, I used to be. In this video I'm going to share with you how I've done it and the last tip I'll share in today's video is the absolute game changer.

First, I want to share with you what happened with my first baby. I co-slept, night nursed, pottied. He woke up every two hours for the entire first two years because I did not know how to teach my baby how to sleep. I actually was so into attachment parenting that I thought that it would be a bad thing to sleep train or something like that. Now, fast-forward to baby number six. I did not do any sleep training, and I'm going to tell you how to do that in this video. With baby number one, it was terrible. I would put him down for a nap, and I swear within 30 seconds his arm would go up, and he would be wide awake. Every single day I walked a mile and a half each direction wearing him in a Moby Wrap and eating a lamb Tikka Masala wrap. I got the exact same thing every single day, seven days a week. For the first six months I walked with him three miles a day just to get him to nap once a day. It was terrible. At night, it was awful.

By the end of that whole experience, and then I had another baby when he was three, I ended up finding out I had postpartum depression. Probably a big part of that was because I was not sleeping and he was not sleeping, and it was really miserable. First baby, that was terrible. Second through fifth babies, I got a little bit better at sleep each time. I only co-slept for three months with all of them. Did some sleep training with the second baby, and I felt really guilty about that.

Fast-forward to today. As of last week, I had never slept through a night of sleep, the entire night myself, for 13 years. You guys, it's like, drive me crazy. Thirteen years of sleep deprivation will really do a number on you, let me tell you. Luckily, with baby number six, I found some great resources and I was able to break this cycle of terrible sleep. I ended up buying Little Z's Sleep Newborn Baby course. I learned a couple of key things that helped me with the first three weeks. Tell me if you've been here before, where your baby just sleeps all day and then won't sleep at all at night. Then they're up all night, and then you're spending two hours trying to get them back to sleep in the middle of the night. It is like purgatory. It's terrible. I bought her courses and they taught me a couple of things.

First of all, I co-sleep at the beginning, and I co-slept for the first eight or nine weeks with Marilyn. I didn't do the swaddle thing. I tried one time and I felt so bad about it, I just don't like the swaddle thing. I decided to do everything but swaddling, which is what she taught me how to do. Becca is her name, at Little Z’s. Now, I already knew from previous research not to nurse my baby to sleep for her naps during the day. There is something that's called the baby sleep cycle that I have created that I teach to my crew over at Go Diaper Free. Basically, it's wake up and then we potty, and then we nurse, and then the first fuss we potty again. Then towards the end of that, we potty again, and then we put them to sleep. I will do a separate video on that and you can check that out. When you have a first baby, you don't know what kind of rhythm or anything they're supposed to go by. It's just a big huge mess of things you have to do, and there's no real order that it comes with. “It,” as in a baby.

Little Z’s taught me two really important things. Number one, is to put my baby to sleep for the night between 7:00 and 9:00 PM. If she's been sleeping since 5:00 and sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, and she's still sleeping and it's 9:00 or it's 10:00 or whatever, if I don't wake her up between 7:00 and 9:00 and keep her up for 30 minutes and then put her back to sleep, then I'm going to be in trouble.

There's actually three things she taught me. The second thing she taught me is not to put a baby to sleep, asleep. To put a baby to sleep, lay them down for a bed while they're still awake. That's pretty important too. Number three, and this is probably the most important thing, and I had heard this from the book Babywise a long time ago, but it never really made sense until Becca explained it in her baby course, that your newborn should only be awake between 45 and 60 minutes at a time between ages zero to 12 weeks. You guys, this is gold. Do you realize how much stress and trouble this can cause you? The baby's not going to go, "Oh, I'm so tired, mom. Put me to sleep now." No way. Baby's not going to do that. Baby's going to be freaking out because you missed the window in which to put her back to bed without any kind of friction.

What we did was co-slept. We put in Becca's little fixes within about three weeks, and we had her only waking up once or twice a night at 1:30 and 5:30, or just at 3:30, and it was awesome. The problem was she was taking up half of our king-size bed. No kidding. I decided, okay, it's time to put her in her crib. I moved her upstairs in the girl's room. There's a bunk bed there with my nine-year-old and four-year-old girls. I have six children, the boys are in the other room, and then the other boy is in the attic, and we have a full house. I put her in her crib, got it all ready for her. I do have a pad on the top of the mattress because the mattress is so hard when you move from co-sleeping to a crib. It's just really different to put them on this plastic, hard bed. I found a really super-safe, corner to corner, edge to edge, organic foam topper for the crib.

I also use a baby monitor. It's cool because then I can watch baby and really hear what's going on. I also seriously love white noise for my babies. I don't turn it up too loud so it damages their ears or anything. Even after all of this, you guys, she was still waking up once or twice a night. She was doing this thing during the day where her head would stay in the same place and her body could go like 180. Because at three months old, they start to roll over. She was also starting to scoot around in a circle. Then it dawned on me, well, maybe she's worried about her blanket and she keeps waking herself up because of really strong instincts for survival that our babies are born with. Then I was like, "Oh, I have sleep sacks, I have wearable blankets. Oh my gosh, why don't we try that?" It was a Burt's Bees one that's like super-thick, quilted. I had fluffed it in the laundry already, so it was really thick and cozy, just like a blanket, which she uses a Burt's Bees blanket. It was like the same exact thing.

I went ahead and put her in this. Marilyn slept through the night from 8:30 PM to 6:30 AM five nights ago, you guys. I actually woke her up at 4:30 because my boobs were so engorged because I really needed to feed her. I woke her up and put her back to sleep. Then the next night, four nights ago, and all four nights since then, because she's wearing this sleep sack. It was such a game changer for us. She has literally slept through the night for 10 hours a night. I've never had a baby do that, you guys, of all my six, because I finally figured out some things. You guys, it's been amazing.

Nicole:
Thanks so much for tuning in today. I hope that was helpful. Please head over to the blog at godiaperfree.com/240 to find links to everything Andrea mentioned, and we'd love to hear from you. Have you tried any of these methods with your baby? What's your best tip to help baby sleep through the night? Let us know in the comments.

Next week, we're going to be talking about poop, again. Specifically, how poop can change throughout your EC journey and when you might need to be concerned about it. See you then.

Want to catch your first pee today? Grab Andrea's free easy start guide and do just that. It's only one page and it will change your world. Get it at godiaperfree.com/start. We'll see you next time.