You all know how I looooooove feeding Caleb when it’s my turn, during the night / wee hours of the morning; and how I looooooove exacting revenge on his bullying antics to his Daddee!

And you all know how I am resisting comparing my two kids and their respective “achievements”.

But…

Caitlin has been great in that we (okay, mainly mother in law!) have been able to train her to sleep through the night and toilet-training- she didn’t require overnight feeding anymore since around 4-5 months old. And I think she was toilet trained at around 2-3 years… Gotta check with Hot Mummee.

Now that Caleb’s 5 months old, we are also trying to replicate these milestones for him, starting with the feeding, naturally.

We now make 7oz for him (whether he downs it all is another matter!), spacing each feed at about 4 hours. This gap is mostly the time he naturally gets hungry, and less so of us specifically making it a point to feed him at these intervals.

Since there have been a few nights where he’s actually managed to sleep through the whole night without waking (both Hot Mummee and I have been lucky to experience this while it was our turn for the night) we reckon is time to try this out on him.

With the cooperation of mother in law watching the timing during the day, we are looking at timing his last few feeds of the day to be around 5pm, then 8-9pm, and then midnight. It would also help if he doesn’t sleep too much during the day: We don’t purposely deprive him of daytime sleep, just that he himself seems to want to stay up more during the day lately. Hopefully by the time midnight feed comes around, he’d be so exhausted that he’d just sleep right through the night.

The challenges that I can think of now are if he is able to finish the bottle before dozing off. I have shared how frustrating it is trying to feed him when he is tired: He’d wrestle the bottle, whine, turn his head side to side. There have been times when we just give up trying to feed him after he actually dozes off with the teat still in his mouth.

I don’t know how long before this will take effect, or whether we are able to be consistent with the timing. Hopefully we are able to, and to gain back our sanity and some youth from going back to normal sleeping routines! As Caitlin also still sleeps in our room, she too suffers from the interruptions if/when Caleb wakes in the wee hours. She has to wake early too now that she is going to school.

After this of course, we will then tackle the next growing-up-skill of toilet training!