Lately I've noticed that Iola has cleverly shifted the bulk of her feedings to night feedings. How convenient for her! She gets to save her awake time to look around at stuff and laugh at people, and doesn't have to spend all that time sucking. At night, after she grunts to signal her hunger, she can sleep straight through the sucking. And sucking. And more sucking. Then sometimes she has to grunt again to signal her need to be burped. I'm the only one who loses sleep.

We are attachment parenting people. She sleeps with us half the time, we respond to her hunger and other cries right away, and we carry her in a sling all around town. And after 3 months she's securely attached, very consolable, and no longer in the 4th trimester. So I feel OK about instituting some strictness.

At around one month, we started guiding her towards a sleeping schedule recommended by Gina Ford in the Contented Little Baby book. Gina is pretty exact, so we treated it the way we treat recipes in cookbooks: a little of this, a little of that, about that long, oh that's a great idea, but wait hold the sesame oil. So she has her bath, massage, and 7pm bed time, and then wakes for the morning at 7am. Then she has a 9am nap, which lasts 45 minutes, another one at 12 which lasts 2 hours (sometimes), and finally a refresher nap at 5pm of only 15 minutes (if her long nap was short, then this one is 45 minutes). All this happened very naturally, though she still needs help actually getting to sleep, and it  preempted her colicky evening attitude. Meanwhile she ate whenever she was hungry.

I never paid any attention to Gina's feeding times. It didn't seem possible or really worth it. Maybe other babies are more reasonable; Iola is a force to be reckoned with when she's hungry. It's my fault for eating so constantly when she was prenatal; I was a very reliable IV drip. And I don't really mind getting up to feed her in the night -- it's better than being pregnant.

But... I decided to start. I'm realizing that given her own free will, Iola would prefer to be a nocturnal feeder. And that's just not socially acceptable. Some day I'll need to go back to work, and some day she'll be in a crib in her own room.

Gina says babies can be trained to sleep 8 hours through the night without waking to feed, as long as they are getting most of their calories in the day. So the training started last night, with a bottle of water and a pacifier. I woke her up to feed her at 11pm. She woke up at 1am, but went back to sleep with the pacifier. Then she woke again at 2am and I gave her some water and then let her nurse. She slept till 4, I strung her along with water till 5, then fed her. Then gave her the morning feed in bed at 7... and let go of any thoughts of a day-time feeding schedule. She had some calorie catching up to do, and anyway, one thing at a time.

I'm giving it four solid nights of training before I even think of giving up.