Gina ford question for gina mums

[Saila]

please no comments on whether GF is good or bad...

for those who use her routines.. i have a four month old who's taken to GF really well and has been in the same routine since about 12 weeks when he started sleeping from 10pm to 7am

however he's totally lost interest in his 7am feed (only JUST had half a feed for breakfast at 8am) and he's now completely zonked out at his 10pm feed... i'm scared to drop his 10pm feed in case he starts night time waking and i'm back at work now so sleep deprivation is not something either the baby or i want to revisit

has anyone got any advice?

how did you drop the 10pm feed?

edit to say - good idea on going for it on a fri/sat night. i will have a go at that

[nunheadmum]

I wasn't a pure Gina mum but did use her for guidance, so hopefully I'm qualified to make some comment. You say your little one is zonked out but does he still take a feed at 10pm? If he is still taking some milk, I'd try cutting down on the amount perhaps as the first step and see how he reacts.

It's always hard to be sure as babies react differently. Also as he approaches weaning, he may start to pick up his appetite again so the 10pm feed may come back in again to avoid him waking in the early hours.

There is a Gina Ford website which I found very useful for discussing the various tweaks on the forums with other mums. You do need to pay a subscription. But the benefit is like minded mums who are all trying the approach. I found it helpful to realise that few follow the routines to the letter and most need tweaks at one stage or another to get through - it's not quite as easy as the book makes out!!

[candj]

I dropped the 10pm feed when both mine started weaning and eating solids (purees) around 6-7 months. At this point they were no longer interested in being woken up at 10pm. The idea is to have baby take all of his calories during the day so that he doesn't wake during the night hungry.

Do you have to wake him up for his 10pm feed or does he naturally start stirring in his sleep? If you have to wake him perhaps try not waking him on a Friday or Saturday evening and see if he can make it through the night. If he wakes at 5am you know then that he still needs his dream feed.

Hope this helps.

[elfadair]

This sounds a bit like us. I say just go for it - drop the feed and keep your fingers crossed!

My baby (4.5 months) fell into Gina's nightime routine by accident from about 6 weeks. We used to wake her up before we headed to bed (11-11:30pm) to feed, then she'd sleep until about 6-7am. A few weeks ago she started becoming un-wakeable at 11pm. After a couple of nights of falling asleep during the feed and one night of puking up the whole thing I decided to risk it and not wake her. It was all fine!!!

Since then she has woken up anywhere between 5:30am and 7:30am (today - yah!), but I've found she is not actually starving hungry when she wakes. When she wakes at 5:30am I can hear her playing in her cot. The first couple of mornings I lept up, worried that she was wasting away, but now I leave her and have found she'll either go back to sleep after a play or gets bored and wants to get up (and then 10 mins later decides she wants to eat)

Basically she seems to have an adult sleeping pattern (I know I'm never hungry when I first wake up, but then get hungry after a bit). Sounds like your baby is the same.

She is not a GF baby during the day - she eats absolutely loads frequently during the day and has 3 or 4 cat naps of 30-45mins (can't make her sleep for any longer than that!) Both of these may have a lot to do with the night time but to be honest I just think its her body chemistry/genes (me and her Dad were always big sleepers)

[Princess]

Hi Saila,

My little one has responded really well to routine too. Mine too is based on Gina but tweaked a little.

We started at 12 weeks and he went through exactly the same thing as you at about 4 months. I had started to pull back the 10pm feed by 10 mins each night so that ultimately we would be in a position to cut it out completely and we got to about 9pm and he was out for the count so one night I risked it. Much to my surprise he slept through. He's now 5 months and sleeps quite happily 7pm - 7am every night.

As for the breakfast feed. Again the same thing happened at around the same time. I thought he'd be starving at 7am but he only really has 10 mins on my boob (about half a feed). I have noticed he makes sure he takes full feeds at all his other feeds throughout the day taking a smaller one again just before bed. After much 'first time mum' worrying I know he's putting on good weight and generally seems contented so I figure he knows when and how much he wants and I've just got to relax a bit about it (easier said than done).

Good luck

Princess

[Saila]

he has a really big feed (7/8ounces) at 10pm but i've pretty much always had to wake him for it ...

he's also beginning to get fractious at around his afternoon nap time and i wonder whether he's naturally dropping his afternoon nap... perhaps he'll benefit if he sleeps for a whole 12 hours solidly and the afternoon nap drops simultaneously and stress free?

did you find that?

i will try the gina website too

thanks v much

[Pickle]

My son continued to have a 10pm feed until weaning was established, but daughter (who admittedly was more of a Gina Ford "lite" baby) only had that feed until she was about 11 weeks old. It meant she didn't always sleep right through till morning, but 8 out of 10 nights she did.

At the time I was really tired in the evenings coping with a baby and a toddler so decided it was better for me to be able to go to bed early and get a decent few hours sleep, and if she did wake in the night it was always a very quick process to feed her and resettle her to sleep again.

[Princess]

Naps I can't comment on!! After 8 weeks of 2 naps a day, one for an hour and one for 3 hours we seem to be moving into a 4 shorter naps a day pattern. As long as he still sleeps through I'm prepared to follow his lead on the naps!

[Belle]

i had this but at that stage (10ish weeks) I was still doing a 3amish feed. i found I was working hard to get him to take that feed - and then he had little or no interest in his 7ish feed. So rather than cutting the 3am feed completely (as he was still waking for it) I just didn't persevere so much when he stopped after only a couple of ounces, and I found he had more at 7am accordingly (which is what GF's advice says) - and it fact a couple of weeks later slept through (still did the dream feed). i wonder if the same principle might work with your dream feed - maybe try it, so he has the option of feeding then - but if not interested don't bother persevering with the rest of the feed, and keep that up for a week or so as some nights he might be hungrier than others...but as others have said sounds like you could probably drop it with no problems if he's still not bothered. I didn't drop the dream feed (though was a misnomer in our house as he was never asleep for it) until 8is months and looking back it was madness clinging on to it for so long, mainly fear that it was the one thing getting him through the night I guess.

[Belle]

on naps - our little boy was on 3 naps till quite late - think poss 9ish months but can't really remember - def later th an GF routine though, but think the last one gradually got shorter and shorter. Does he still sleep at that time even though fractious beforehand?

[Saila]

He does go to sleep but he fights it and cries. Whereas he doesn't normally cry when i put him down, just goes straight to sleep. So it's like he doesn't really want to go to sleep but he needs it... I tried not putting him down and that resulted in him being fractious, so i dont' want to take it away yet completely

i'm thinking it may resolve itself if he gets a better sleep at night.

I may keep trying with the afternoon nap until i drop the 10pm feed this w/e and see what happens. Hopefully then he wont need the afternoon nap after a proper night's sleep.

all really helpful - thanks v much again

[elfadair]

I agree with Princess on naps - with me its whatever works to get the night right. Definitely a GF-lite approach though, so depends on how much you want to follow GF.

And that goes for feeding too. She started needing day feeds more frequently after we dropped the nightime, which over the course of the day meant an additional feed (which made up for the dropped late-night feed in terms of total volume of food).

[Belle]

sounds like he is tired at tha tpoint then...maybe just that as he's getting older he's starting to not want to leave the party and go to sleep kind of thing (that's what my son was/is like anyway!) so protesting a bit but still needing, and getting, that sleep. I'd keep going with it till he refuses to sleep at that time to be honest - really believe in sleep begets sleep in terms of the night-time, or at the very least, sleep begets happier baby to deal with come bedtime!

[Saila]

i dropped the dream feed to 4 ounces (half a feed) last night

not a peep during the night and he took a full feed at 7am today :)

i have a big night out with the nct girls tongiht so i'm not going to risk removing the dream feed until sat night

fingers xed

p.s. I looked at the gina website and it's really helpful. Basically it's just gina mums answering gina questions. People on this thread are often saying their 'gina-lite' but i would guess most people are, are they not? each baby's different and gina herself says you need to use common sense and adjust her principles accordingly.

Do you think we should start a thread with questions from gina mums to new gina mums? Do you think there's demand?

i found everyone's advice really helpful on here and perhaps others would too?

[samigirl]

Maybe reduce the Dreamfeed a bit....my daughter is bad at eating in the morning due to everything else being more interesting - so even if she wakes at 7am i treat as a night feed ie night light, no talking etc and then once she has eaten - get her up and do the fun stuff. If i don't she takes what she needs to quell the hunger then wants to play - then hungry a couple of hours later......then i am doing half feeds for the rest of the day :(

There is a free group for Gina babies on Babycenter.co.uk - which i found really useful!