Self Settling......Its not a myth!

I often get asked "how does Brandon just put himself to sleep??" So what a perfect subject for me to write about. How did I self settle with Brandon!

No self settling is not a myth!

I firstly want to say that I'm not a sleep expert and have had no sleep training what so ever. I'm just sharing my experience as a new mum.

We had decided months before Brandon was born we would try to not be those parents who would rock their baby to sleep. Lets face it though you do what works for you in those early days. Really we where not to know how he would be once he was born. We would do what would work for us! Some babies are just natural self settlers. I was one of those lucky parents who has a self settler. He was either natural or the time he spent in Special Care taught him to put himself to sleep.

Brandon spent 5 nights in special care I would go in every 3 hours feed him change him and put him into his bed AWAKE. This was probably the best thing I could have done. At that moment I didn't realise that I was actually setting him up to learn to self settle. I was just going with the flow. I had no idea what I was doing and neither did he but he learnt! I was learning too. At that time we where both learning from each other.

Babies are unique! Just like their sleep habits. They wont all do the same things with naps, bed time, or night time sleep.

I'm not going to sit here and lie, and say he 100% puts himself to sleep every single time. Because lets be honest that is far from the truth! We actually went through a stage where I would just feed him to sleep because that was just the easiest thing to do. This was during one of those amazing wonder weeks! I quickly realized he was using my boob as a dummy and I had to teach him that the boob is not for putting to sleep. I even offered him a dummy at this stage which he had no clue what to do with he just chewed on it! His since progressed from breastfeeding to the formula. I'm feeling so much better about bottle feeding. He was getting extremely distracted with breast feeding and definitely wasn't getting enough milk so was waking very regularly during the night.

Some days I will put him down for a sleep and he will do quite a bit of protesting but he soon realizes who's boss in this situation and its certainly not him!

At the age of about 6 months I thought I would introduce a comforter. Seriously this kid loves his comforters! No that's not a typeo its comforters more than 1! He actually uses them to put himself to sleep. He rubs them on his face and bang his out in a few minutes! Please if your going to get a comforter get a few of the same one. I bought the bear when i was pregnant and I made the big mistake of only buying one and his so in love with it and do you think I can remember where i got it from? Nope! I have literally been everywhere to try and atleast find one similar with no success to date!

Sometimes Brandon likes to what I like to think is testing us! I do everything possible to not pick him up when his doing this. I will SHHHHH loudly and just pat the mattress next to his head and that seems to calm him down enough that I can walk out of the room. I also got given this magic device for my babyshower called a "baby shusher" saves those head spins from going SHHHH over and over again! Call me lazy but let me tell you it works!

A sleep cycle is generally 40-45 minutes sometimes during a nap he will wake up after this period but he will put himself back to sleep because his become aware that his still tired and needs to sleep longer. It has taken me a form of "sleep training" to get him into this routine. Which involved about a solid week of resettling after he woke after 40 minutes in the day time.  Now most days he sleeps 1-2 hours in the morning and 40 minutes in the afternoon sometimes we are lucky enough to get another 2 hours but that's rare!


So my advice to new mums is try self settling from the moment they are born basically start when your in hospital. Because seriously who wants to rock a 10kg+ baby to sleep every single time they need to have a sleep. I know that's something i never wanted to do. I can only imagine it would be painful on your back and arms.