I
am a follower of the “never let your baby cry”
rule, and I took it very seriously. What I didn’t understand,
though, is that babies make sounds in their sleep.
And these sounds do not mean that baby needs you.
Babies moan, grunt, snuffle, whimper, and even cry in
their sleep. Babies can even nurse in their sleep.
The
first step to helping your baby sleep longer is to determine
the difference between sleeping noises and awake noises. When
she makes a noise: Stop. Listen. Wait. Peek. As you listen
attentively to her noises, and watch her, you will learn the
difference between sleeping snorts and "I'm waking up
and I need you now" noises.
When
I learned this eye-opening piece of information, I started
“playing asleep” when Coleton made a nighttime
noise. I would just listen and watch — not moving a
single muscle — until he began to make actual wakeful
noises. Some of the time, he never did; he just went back
to sleep!
The
idea, then, is to learn when you should pick your baby up
for a night feeding and when you can let her go back to sleep
on her own.
This
is a time when you need to really focus your instincts and
intuition. This is when you should try very hard to learn
how to read your baby’s signals.
You
need to listen and watch your baby carefully. Learn to differentiate
between these sleeping sounds and awake and hungry sounds.
If she is really awake and hungry, you’ll want to feed
her as quickly as possible. If you do respond immediately
when she is hungry, she will most likely go back to sleep
quickly.
So,
the key here is to listen carefully when your baby makes night
noises:
If she is making “sleeping noises”— let
her sleep.
If she really is waking up – tend to her quickly.
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