Sleep was the hardest part of about being a single mom by choice. Nights are long when you’re the only one on call with a baby waking every hour or two. After reading everything I could on baby sleep, I decided there had to be a better way than letting them cry. With all the baby tools and gadgets we have these days, surely there’s a better way to help your little one sleep.

Here is my method to getting my baby to sleep in 5-6 hour stretches at age 4 months. I did it with minimal tears and many many tools.

If you’re looking for tips from 0-4 months, check out part one of this blog.

4 months: Sleep training can commence if you’re both ready

You should never sleep train before 4 months and 6 months is what’s recommended. There is no hard or fast rule about when you need to start, but I would recommend doing it when babies switch from bassinet to crib, whenever that happens to be. That provides a natural break in their sleep habits and it’s easier to introduce a new routine with the new bed, rather than confuse your little one about why they suddenly aren’t able to sleep they way they’re used to in their bassinets.

My son was 20 lbs at 4 months so he was big. For me, outgrowing the Snoo, moving to a crib, the 4 month sleep regression, moving from swaddle to sleep sack, and daylight savings all happened within the same week. I would NOT advise this lol. Here’s how I survived.

1. I started doing arms out in the Snoo swaddle from about 3.5 months so he’d get used to it before leaving the swaddle behind. When it was time to move into the crib and away from swaddles, he jumped right to the sleep sack pretty easily. We used a Woolino one that I would highly recommend.

2. I used the weaning mode on the Snoo for 2-3 days before I started putting him in the crib for naps. The weaning mode keeps the Snoo motionless unless the baby gets fussy and then it moves as usual. The idea is to get them used to sleeping without movement before you put them in a crib.

3. Once my son was doing all his naps in the crib for 2 days and his nights in the Snoo, we made the jump completely to all sleep in the crib. The whole transition took about 5 days and was pretty easy.

Once he was out of the Snoo completely, I introduced some new sleep habits.

1. I doubled down on following his bedtime routine consistently each evening to he’d know it was time for bed – adding in an exercise component.

2. I bought a Ninni pacifier to use to put him to sleep in order to stop feeding to sleep.

3. I introduced the “once down stay down” rule for putting him to sleep to eliminate getting into cycles of picking the baby up and down over and over to sleep.

Let’s break this down below:

The bedtime routine: Here’s where the 5 Bs of bedtime shifted a little. Up until now I had been doing bottle, bath, book, breast, bed but I was ready to stop feeding to sleep so both the breast and bottle moved before bathtime. I also introduced a new tool – the Jolly Jumper.

Tool to try: Jolly Jumpers hang from your door frame or in an independent frame (I had this version) and have a little harness your baby goes into so they can jump freely without anyone holding them. Babies need to be at least 3 months old to use it, but more importantly, they need to be able to hold up their own head. If you put your baby in a JJ and they lean forward as if they are looking at their feet while they jump, your little one is too small. Wait a few more weeks and try again.

Starting at 6:30 pm the new routine became: feed from one breast, do 15 minutes in the Jolly Jumper to burn off energy before bed, feed from the other breast, play with the baby for a little bit, give a bottle (3 oz by 4 months), then do the bath for 10 minutes. After bath time, massage your little one to get them tired, especially their feet. Change them into night diapers (using diaper cream!), and their pajamas or sleeper. Read a few books then put them in their sleep sack. Carry to the crib in the dark with the noise machine going and put them to bed with a key phrase. I used, “Now it’s time to sleep.”

The Ninni

So how did I get my tired but clearly awake and used to feeding to sleep baby to go down without tears? That’s where the Ninni comes in.

Tools to try: The Ninni Pacifier is a special and honestly super weird paci that works wonders. You can only buy it from their website (no Amazon, sorry). The thing about this paci is it’s very light silicon and designed to mimic the breast. It looks different from other pacis out there and there is a learning curve to using it as the baby’s need to latch the same as a breast, rather than suck like a normal paci. These pacis can only really be used when the baby is resting as they fall out easily if they’re moving or playing, much like a breast would.

Once my son was in the crib, I’d sit next to it and put the Ninni in his mouth. Sometimes I would need to hold it or replace it as it is hard for babies to keep in their mouths. But that is a good thing. My baby would use it to go to sleep, and it would fall out within 5 minutes of him sleeping so he never developed any negative sleep habits with the paci like waking every time he didn’t have it.

Now I’m not going to lie, the first day or two of doing this, he did cry. He was used to the Snoo, to nursing to sleep, and didn’t like being put down awake in his crib. But within 3-4 days he got used to the routine. There were some nights where he’d be asleep within seconds with the Ninni. Others were it might take 10-15 minutes to get him to calm down.

Sometimes you might need to guide their arms down to their sides if they are flailing in excitement. This helps cue babies it’s time to sleep. I would hover a hand over one arm, then the other to do this so they could still move but they’d hit my hand if they tried to raise up too much. Often that’s all it took for to relax the arms for sleep. My other hand was hovering over the pacifier to pop it back in if it fell out. I can’t say this was the most comfortable position, but it did work.

At the same time as I was doing this with the pacifier, I also introduced the “once down stay down” approach. My son learned quickly that sleep time, with his cued phrase, meant the Ninni and we’d do that until he was asleep. There was no more being picked up over and over again. Honestly, with the Ninni it was an easy habit to break because he was still using a tool for comfort, it just wasn’t being picked up and walked around anymore.

Tool to try: Once they are out of the Snoo, you’ll need a white noise machine to take over. There are many, many to choose from, but I like the ever so popular Hatch machine. It has multiple options for light colour and sound, though no light and the washing machine white noise are recommended. If you need light at night when the baby wakes, use the red light feature. It also has a handy app to control all the settings like the brightness and sound level. Plus is doubles as a baby monitor which works over other apps once you close the Hatch one which is great. There’s even a feature to allow you to talk to your baby from the app. 

4.5 months: Moving on to naps

While we were getting the bedtime routine set, I was still nursing to sleep for naps. Naps are always trickier to sort out because your baby won’t be as tired as they are by bedtime. I recommend starting with bedtime first so they learn the routine and then slowly applying it to naps.

For me, this meant trying 1 nap a day with the Ninni and the rest nursing to sleep. Once that was happening consistently, we went for two naps a day and so on. Once we hit all naps with the Ninni (in about 1-2 weeks) there was no going back.

That is probably the secret to any sleep training. Be consistent. Baby’s are smart and will learn the routine you want them to. Don’t undo your progress just because you miss baby cuddles. And miss them you will. Nursing to sleep is so incredibly nice. I had to be ready to let that go as much as my son and it wasn’t easy to give up.

By 5 months, all naps and bedtime sleep were happening in the crib with the Ninni and not nursing to sleep. Note, I was still doing 1-2 night time feedings if my baby asked for them. My rule for night time was if he woke under 3 hours and wasn’t in distress, I’d put him back to sleep with the Ninni. If he woke after 3 hours, even if he wasn’t in distress, I’d wait a minute or two to see if he continued to fuss and if so, I’d feed him back to sleep.

Waiting a few minutes by 5 months is important because sometimes, your baby doesn’t actually need you. They’re just in between a sleep cycle and will fall back asleep on their own. Picking them up to feed them will wake them completely instead of letting them lull back into their cycle.

By this age, a typical night for us would be bedtime between 7:30-8:30pm as needed, feed 1 around 1-2am, feed 2 around 6-7am, wake up for the day between 8-9am.

6 months and beyond: Dropping night feedings

First of all, talk with your pediatrician about when your baby is cleared to drop night feeds. Some smaller babies may need them up to a year. Larger babies, like my son, maybe be able to drop them sooner. At 6 months, he was the size of a 12 month old so we were cleared to stop feeding at night. Even so I waited another month until I tried.

Again, you need to be ready to lose that intimacy with your little one and your baby needs to be ready to stop the feed. The timing of this will be different for everyone and this step can happen anytime between 6-12 months as needed. There’s no schedule except your own.

Decreasing vs cold turkey

There are two ways to stop night feeding. One is just to go cold turkey and cut them off. You make sure babies get good feed right before bed and then use a pacifier or other soothing technique when they wake during the night. Milk is reserved for when they wake for the day.

A less drastic technique is to decrease how much time they get to feed at night. If your child is used to a midnight feeding, for example, you keep it up but each day you take a minute away from the total time they can spend feeding. So if an average night feed is 10 minutes, the first day the baby might only get 8-9 minutes before you pop them off. The next day it drops to 7, then the next day to 6 and so on. Your baby will gradually get used to less and less milk until they don’t need it anymore and stay asleep.

For my son, I started out decreasing feeds, but it only lasted 3 days or so before he went cold turkey on his own. The first time he slept 10.5 hours on his own I thought there was something wrong with my sleep timer!

Sleep is ever changing

There you have it. My method for getting your child used to sleeping with minimal tears. I will say that while my kiddo is a good sleeper in general, nothing is ever permanent. If he gets sick or we go visit someone and stay over, his sleep gets disrupted very easily. At the end of the day, just do what works best for your family and if you need to reset and try again don’t get discouraged. Infant sleep is a marathon, not a race. And eventually, that baby will sleep.