It all started with a lovely girls-weekend (+baby!) at a women’s retreat at a very nice hotel that was supposed to be a wonderful relaxing weekend and turned into an exhausting no-sleep-for-anyone weekend. Bjorn refused to sleep in the fancy-schmancy hotel and I guess I reached my breaking point.

Well, it turned out to have some pretty good ideas in it! And I will confess, I haven’t even read the whole thing yet… just skipped through and read some chapters here and there that seemed to relate to us. I really like the no-cry thing. (Or I should say relatively-no-cry, compared to the CIO methods out there!) I guess I’m just not strong enough to listen to my baby wail when all he wants is me!

Basically, for us, it was a change of routine as far as his eating goes (remember him always falling asleep nursing?) and re-learning his sleepy-signs. I think I was always letting him go too far into exhaustion. Now he rarely stays awake for more than 2 hours during the day, except for the evening stretch before bedtime. And he nurses when he wakes up instead of when he gets tired, and has a real-food snack before naptime if he’s hungry!

Now, there are so many more things I have learned already from this book, but I will stop for now. I don’t want to bore you all! :o)

I need your help mamas! My 6-month-old not-so-little-anymore baby is turning a new chapter in our lives. He is growing up, doing things on his own, becoming a little man… and I am so ready to move on from holding him for naps.

Now, please just skip over the judgement on this one, and go straight to the helpful advice! :o)

I know, very well thank you, that I should have stopped holding him for his naps a long time ago. Like 5 months ago! At least that’s what ‘they’ say. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. And now I am ready to begin the tough journey of weaning us from each other.

Speaking of weaning… I want to present you with the toughest challenge of this endeavor (in my opinion anyways!). Bjorn is exclusively breastfed (NO bottles) and has always fallen asleep while he nurses. Almost every time. He starts to eat and then passes out.

Can you really blame him? Cuddles and warm milk would do the same thing to me!

And then he continues to eat/sleep/eat/sleep for sometimes more than an hour. Which means not so good rest for him, and no rest for me.

The problem is, as soon as I try to un-latch him so that I can even consider moving him to his bed, he wakes up hungry and voraciously starts eating again… for 2 seconds. Then he passes out again.

And please don’t say that he is manipulating me. I don’t believe that a 6 month old can be manipulative, and you’re not going to change my mind on that one!

Also, I am not looking at moving him to a bottle at all. So… there’s my first hurdle! How do I get him to eat without falling asleep? Or at least, how do I convince him he’s done eating, when he thinks he’s not??

I’ve tried just about everything to keep him awake while he eats, and it never works. All I’ve succeeded in doing is getting him to STOP eating, and then when he tries again, he falls asleep,again. I’m running out of ideas mamas…