How to Get Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night

Babies that are great sleepers, even through the night — is that an oxymoron or actually a reasonable thing to expect? Fortunately, it is totally possible to help your baby get the sleep he or she needs, and in turn, the sleep you desperately need.

After I had my twins, I first turned to Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth, MD. It really focuses on scheduling your baby’s naps and bedtimes and making the rest of your schedule work around the baby’s sleep. The downside is that your are completely beholden to doing any outside activity around when your baby needs to nap, and disturbing that schedule can definitely have negative consequences, i.e., a cranky, overtired baby. The upside is that you can totally predict when your baby is going to be alert and happy and schedule important events during that time.

As anyone can imagine, a happy well-rested baby is totally worth not being able to head out of the house whenever you feel like it. My twins thrived on sleep and needed a lot of it — three naps a day in their cribs until they were almost a year old. We completely embraced the schedule and reaped the benefits.

Nighttime was another story. By the time they were six months old (four and a half months old adjusted because they were preemies), they weighed enough to sleep through the night, but were each waking two times per night, one hour apart. Yes, that means I was waking up four times every night. This was much better than the early days when they were eating every three hours around the clock, but after so many months of not getting sleep, I was desperate for a full night’s sleep. I heard about Twelve Hours’ Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old by Suzy Giordano and decided to give it a try. Basically, it has you reschedule the baby’s feedings so that they are eating less and less in the middle of the night and more and more during the day. If they eat less at night, it is pretty much guaranteed that they will make up that amount during the day.

Once the baby eats the amount he or she is supposed to take in in any 24-hour period during the daytime hours, there is no need for the baby to wake at night to eat. The baby may want to wake up to hang out with you, but because you know the baby isn’t hungry, you can allow him or her to self-soothe (another tip from Dr. Weissbluth) and put themselves back to sleep. I accomplished this in three nights with my twins and in two nights with my third daughter. Victory! There is nothing better after months of being sleep deprived than actually having consecutive nights of sleep because your baby is now sleeping twelve hours a night. Nothing!

Nancy Liddell

Nancy Liddell was a new mom of twins, when she made the decision to try to eliminate unnecessary exposure to chemicals and toxins in her household wherever possible. She began investigating the labels of all of the shampoos, conditioners, lotions, and soaps in her house and was astounded by what she found—every single product contained artificial and controversial ingredients.

Thus began Nancy’s search for natural, plant-based products, where she quickly realized that many inferred they were natural or organic, but really were not. Whenyou strip down health and beauty products to the most natural, basic ingredients, they can be both incredibly effective and gentle at the same time. From this philosophy came the Bayberry Naturals product line. Simplistic in its packaging and basic in its premise, Nancy designed it for men, women, and children to cleanse and nurture their bodies without fear of toxins and unnatural ingredients.