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I second all of the sleep training recommendations. I did the TakingCaraBabies class called ABCs of sleep for kids 5-24 months and followed it to a T with both my kids. They both then slept 11 hours a night from that point on. The actual nights of doing it are rough but don’t cave. I stuck to it and after about 5 nights, worked like a charm !
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Sleep training is neglect! It will also come back to haunt you when you have a toddler who hates bedtime and refuses to stay in their room, because you made bedtime a miserable experience. We never did and I’m in BigLaw.
Just lay with them until they go to sleep on a floor bed. It’s cozy and magical and makes for the best sleepers.
But also, expect to wake up and nurse at least once a night until baby is 12 months+. Babies are just designed that way. We eventually did bottles at night and slowly weaned off bottles by watering down the milk over a period of weeks. Baby naturally got less hungry at night and stopped waking up. It was super gentle and not stressful for anyone.
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I do think moms should feel shame for neglecting their child, and sleep training is neglect. It’s just a bad choice. I absolutely judge people who sleep train.
I love that the modern culture of parenting is super supportive of different families making different choices! The spectrum of what constitutes good parenting is enormous, but sleep training is beyond the pale.
No advice just solidarity. I was a shell of a person until my daughter started regularly sleeping through the night, which didn’t happen until she was around 11 months.
One thing you may try if you haven’t already is moving your baby to their own room. We didn’t move our daughter until she was 9 months (and at that point it was pure desperation to try anything that might help her sleep better), but it instantly helped cut down on the nighttime wake-up’s. Neither my husband or I snore, and I didn’t think we were loud sleepers, but we were clearly making more noise than we realized which was waking her up.
My daughter is about to turn 1 and is still up 1-3 times per night, so I get it. I try to go to bed early (no later than 10pm) and sleep as much as possible. We have her in a mini crib next to our bed which makes getting up with her easier, as its easier to fall asleep. Try to prioritize hydration and nutritious eating, to the extent you can!
My son is 16 months and I also am up 1-3 (usually 2) times a night. Haven’t sleep through the night since before his birth. It’s a struggle. I’m a permanently exhausted pigeon.
I only go in once a week. That helps.
Sleep training saved me! Both kids are very happy and healthy and they started sleeping through the night within 3 nights. Can’t imagine doing this job without reliable sleep.
Totally agree SA2, I was able to be a much better mom and they’d were so much happier once everyone was getting good sleep!
Sleep train!!
Are you me? I went back yesterday with a 5.5 month old who still wakes twice a night. I go in 5 days a week and my husband is also in a bigger law firm environment, and with me taking off so much time, is fully adjusted to the weight of a lot of household/baby tasks falling on me. I am seriously ready to quit after 2 days lol
I’m definitely going to try to do more time remote but while I was on leave my firm got a lot more serious about return to office and I’m trying to be visible for the first few weeks back but then going to slowly work my way back to more wfh. My baby is at daycare so part of me feels like I might as well go to the office if I have to leave for drop off or pick up. I’m thinking maybe I should go the nanny route. Idk.
We do have someone clean our house every other week but I’m thinking every week would help my sanity a lot. LOL
Solidarity!
I’m on my second baby who is seven months old and I have a two-year-old. We never sleep trained, as we also believe it’s neglectful and cruel. We lay with our 2 year old for 20 minutes while he falls asleep and then sneak out of his room. He sleeps through the night now. Our baby is sleeping better now. We discovered she’s sensitive to the temperature and light in the room. Maybe try turning down the lights a bit more? Also try a thicker sleep sack and maybe even a space heater to keep the baby warmer- we have one that turns off automatically when it reaches a certain temperature. She is also still in our room and will be until she is one year-old. My husband and I take turns with who puts who down. She started sleeping a lot better when we switched to formula, because I think she gets fuller with her bottles now. I was really sleep deprived at the five month mark, but now that we’re at 7 1/2 months it is a lot better! Keep your head up you will get there!
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I have a 15m old and I find myself going into the office everyday since his daycare is closer to work than home. And it's a struggle. Every. Day.
He was sleeping through the night for a few months but now is waking up again. It's rough since I've been back for a while now and not getting any slack. My hours and mental health are suffering.
I would love to go reduced hours but I am the breadwinner so we cannot afford it.
All I can say is that you are not alone. But being an attorney mom feels almost impossible.
Are you breastfeeding/bottle feeding with breastmilk? If you are, do give vitamins d drops too? Once we started those, it was like magic and now our baby usually only wakes up once to eat fairly early in the morning.
Also if you can swing, splitting the night into shifts with your SO that helped me a lot too when we still had multiple wakes overnight. Being able to get a solid chunk of sleep is a game changer even if it’s not as long as you hope for
Sleep train. And get on a reduced hour schedule.
Honestly idk if it’s recommended to sleep train a 5 month old by gradually leaving them for certain periods of time but maybe there’s other sleep train methods that are more appropriate for a 5 month old. Thankfully, my baby girl started sleeping through the night around 4 ish months but i definitely would’ve tried it closer to 10 months if she wasn’t. Try a sound machine and making sure no lights even a night light are not on.
Right, I read so many mixed things about when to start sleep training. Or moving them to their own room. We might have to move those both up, it’s just so hard with two parents working full time.
We somehow muddle through? Not a great answer, I know.
There's a lot of judgment back and forth on here about "sleep training," which I think can mean different things to different people. Do what is age appropriate and feels right to you, but know that 5 months is still young and you WILL sleep again one day! My son woke up every 3 hours until he was 21 months old (he slept 7 hours in a row ONE time and I thought it was a miracle -- it turned out he was just coming down with a cold). This was pre-COVID so I was commuting every day, and 9 times out of 10, even when my son fell back to sleep, I did not. I would lay there awake until the next time he woke up. It was brutal. He would fall asleep for our nanny and a bottle during the day but not for my husband or me. I nursed him back to sleep every single time. Maybe I could have tried harder to be consistent with putting him down while still awake, but nursing him to sleep was easy and I just kept assuming that he'd sleep for longer stretches on his own as he got older (he didn't). We started with him not in our bed, which lasted about two weeks and then I had him in bed with me and nursed side lying at the recommendation of my aunt who was also a professional lactation consultant and mom of 6, which allowed me to rest more. At some point we moved him to a crib (I forget when - maybe 6 months?) because I thought maybe we were all keeping each other awake by being in the same bed. (I slept more soundly but for him, it made no difference.) By about 11 months I had him back in the bed with me because it was too tiring to go in there and sit in a chair for 30-45 minutes every time he woke up. I raised the idea of hiring a sleep consultant multiple times but my husband wasn't really on board and I felt bad and weirdly privileged spending money on it. When my son was 21 months, I just did it and it was the best money I ever spent.
A professional should work with your comfort level and not advise you to do anything that isn't age appropriate. They can help you adjust your environment, nap times and bedtime start, and if baby won't fall asleep on their own, they can help with that gradually. What we ended up finding out was that my son was on the very low end of sleep needs for his age, so all of the ranges published on the internet about how long a baby should nap or sleep at night and all of the sample sleep schedules were way off. To stop nursing to sleep, we did a gradual fading approach. It took a full month, but after that he slept through the night without issue (except for the occasional night terrors and sleep walking, but that's another thing). (Much later he was diagnosed with ADHD (so was I), which comes with sleep issues and makes a lot of sense in hindsight.) This may not be your situation; I only tell this story to say, trust your intuition and sometimes professional help is needed and I wish I got it sooner. Good luck! (I have no connection with them, but this is who I used: https://www.beaconfidentparent.com/sleep-solutions