Babywise With a Ten Week Old

10 weeks sound SO close to 12 weeks which is when we have always dropped the dream feed and started TWELVE hour nights. Woo!

I have had a lot of question about “how do you know when to drop the 2am feeding” or “when do you drop middle of the night feedings” and the answer is….YOU don’t.

The baby will drop middle of the night feedings when they are ready. If you are doing Babywise this may happen around 8 weeks. That is my experience as well as what the book says. 8 hours by 8 weeks.

So up until that point, or after, you are feeding the baby when they wake up crying to eat.

The dream feed (around 10:30pm) is a feeding that you go in and wake your baby for. So say you lay the baby down for bed at 7:30 and they are capable of sleeping 8 hours….they are going to be awake at 3:30 am. So even though they are giving you an 8 hour stretch…you aren’t getting to sleep through the night yourself.

To fix this, we do a “dream feed.” That means we go in even though the baby is not awake and crying for a feeding and we just “top off.” If you do this feeding at 10:30 and the baby can do an 8 hour stretch that means they go roughly 10:30-6:30 without waking, and that YOU get a full night of sleep too!

We start this arrangement from the beginning, that way bedtime never changes. I know a lot of people just choose to keep their newborns awake til 11 or so, so that they can get more night time sleep. But then you have to deal with eventually introducing an earlier bedtime.

Babywise does suggest to start as you mean to go, and we use the 7/7:30ish bedtime until about age 2 without having to change it! So I am definitely a fan of the normal bedtime/dream feed combo.

Anyway, my point. The dream feed is parent led. You set an alarm and choose to go in and feed a baby who isn’t “asking” to be fed. Middle of the night feedings are baby led. Babies cry out whenever the hunger hits and we wake up to feed them.

So, the dream feed is one that you DO actively choose to drop and the night feed must be on the baby’s terms. It’s just hard for me to believe that in less than a week (since I am writing this in the middle of week 11) that we will not go in for the dream feed.

I might do a whole post about this because it’s probably my favorite concept in Babywise 🙂

Here is how sleep looked when each of my babies were 10 weeks old:

Sam

At ten weeks old we tried a 3.5 hour schedule with Sam. He wasn’t showing interest in eating at the 3 hour mark so this worked well for him. It looked like this:

6:45 – bottle followed by wake time then a nap from 8-10:15

10:15 – bottle followed by wake time then a nap from 11:30-1:45

1:45 – bottle followed by wake time then a nap from 3:00-5:00 (ish because we picked him up around 5

5:15(or as soon as we got home) bottle then wake time with a possible cat nap

7:30 bottle then bed

10:45 dream feed

This was a short lived schedule because at 12 weeks we dropped the dream feed and shifted things around again. Not all babies need or want to do this…but if you find your baby uninterested in eating every 3 hours you can get creative.

His morning wakings were way better than 9 weeks. He woke at 6:40/6:45 most days during this week other than twice when he woke with a diaper leak at 5am.

Tom

I know from social media that Tom slept all night again this week but I just don’t have notes on his morning wake times. This was the week of Christmas and I do know we had to wake him up that morning so he went til the goal of 7:00 at least that one day.

We did not move to a 3.5 hour with Tom. He was pretty happy to slam babas any time we offered. With Tom we waited until after he was sleeping 12 hours consistently and moved from the 3 hour to 4 hour schedule following the Babywise guidelines. Just a reminder that each baby has different needs!

Henry

Henry slept from the dream feed until 6:45 or 7:00 every day that he was 10 weeks old other than one 5am waking. Of course the 5am was a leaky diaper! We are about to experiment with some overnight diapers for these long stretches.

We are still on a 3 hour schedule so we will likely not have to implement that 3.5 hour makeshift schedule we did with Sam…but time will tell.

During this week Henry also starting turning away from that awful 45 minute intruder that popped up back in week 8. It still happened from time to time but no where near as bad as every nap. By the end of this week and into week 11 he started going down like a dream at nap time.

What used to maybe require a few attempts and lots of singing and soothing is turning into a process of laying a happy/sleepy baby down while he is awake and watching him drift off on his own with no crying, just like the book says. It does work! But notice it took 10 weeks to start to get there…it’s worth it 🙂

Scroll to the bottom of this post and you can see how we were doing any week from newborn til now!