Weaning My Baby: My Thoughts - Part 2

Monday 29th of April 2013 | Category: Baby News | Written by: Aaron Clifford

One month on from my previous blog post about weaning things have changed a fair bit with our daughter, for the two weeks after the blog post was made we actually just went back to the bottles of milk as we felt she wasn't quite ready to start weaning. However two weeks ago we started on baby rice in the morning for a week which she seemed to really enjoy, often sucking the baby rice straight off the spoon!

Around one week ago we started to add some pureed apple into the baby rice and that has been a great success, she is enjoying the breakfast a lot, it seems to have come at just the right time as she has also started drinking an ounce or so more in each of her bottles.

Our daughter was five months old last Monday, and she is still changing so much every day, we've got a decent sleeping pattern in place now and she often sleeps from 9/10 PM through to 5/6AM which means we are all getting a bit more sleep than a month or so ago.

She has a smile on her face for most of the day (unless very tired) and seems to be interested in children's television programmes (which drive me insane!), it's really interesting to see a baby develop so much over such a short period of time. Before having my own child I usually opted out of holding small babies and had not been around the development of a baby before; but watching and noticing the daily changes is one of the most rewarding feelings in the world.

Sleeping

One thing we are suffering with is since her final injections at four months she hasn't slept in her crib, currently sleeping on one of us (safely) on the sofa, we have a large corner sofa so we are currently taking turns over the week, with the other of us sleeping in the bed. As she currently is not sitting up fully she's not able to "play" sat down with toys, I feel like once she is able to do this she will more than likely be able to wear herself out enough to go to sleep without too much thought to where she is. Has anyone else experienced similar problems? If so what have you tried to get your baby back into their own crib/cot. As mentioned above we started breakfast recently, I'm hoping once we move on to an evening meal it may be that the food settles her a bit better.

The problem for us is making the step to trying to get her to sleep in the crib regularly, at the moment it can take an hour to get her to settle on one of us in the evening which is tiring. The current situation we are in means all of us get to sleep, which for everyone is important. We have discussed trying again, as she often has a sleep around 5/6-8/9PM trying to get her to sleep in her crib at the 5/6PM sleep shouldn't affect all of our sleep patterns if she doesn't manage to sleep. We are hoping that if we can get her sleeping in the crib at that time we can get her used to the crib in preparation for the longer night time sleep.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with your baby sleeping, and I'm keen to hear any suggestions for settling your baby in the comments below.