Start with not picking him up immediately when he wakes up. Start with 2-3 minutes, then gradually increase the intervals as baby gets used to entertaining himself when he wakes up (instead of crying straight away).. and at night he may even fall back asleep. For initiation of sleep, the bedtime routine needs to change. Bottle feeding needs to end at least 15 minutes before bedtime, and not in the baby’s room, if possible. As for getting baby to sleep, it depends on what method you’re comfortable with.. whether it’s patting to sleep or carrying to sleep or doing the pick up/put down method, or check in method, or cry it out method. It also depends on baby’s personality. You can choose to go cold turkey and try all these at once, or you can change things slowly, eg. stop the bottle feeding first and still continue the rocking. Choose your methods and pace, and be willing to change things if they don’t seem to be working (For me, I didn’t want cry it out at such a young age, but all the other methods could not work). Another really important thing is to chart the timings religiously at the start. Chart the amount of time it takes for baby to fall asleep, the duration of sleep, the duration from waking to the start of crying/calling for you, the awake interval before baby gets tired.. I learnt that if we put baby down at the correct time (baby’s fully sleep trained), she falls asleep within 1-10 minutes of us leaving the room.
Cherlyn