CIO and Dream feeding

Hi I am new to the FY. My twins are 2 1/2 weeks. I see these terms on here a lot and have some kind of idea but if someone can explain what they are and how and when to use them I would appreciate it!

 

CIO= Cry it out. Also called the Ferber method. Not recommended before about 6 months of age. It is the process of teaching your baby to sooth themselves to sleep or back to sleep if they awake in the night.

Dream feeding= Feeding a baby in their sleep with out really waking them. Usually done when you are ready for bed but it's been a while since the last feed and you want to try and "buy" more time sleeping

Congrats on your little ones!

 

Good explanations. I just wanted to add that while the term CIO is thrown out there a lot, it means different things to different people. People who are against ever letting their children cry will be against it and people who have used it successfully will speak more positively about it. Some people use it to get their child to sleep through the night, in which case it is used later, but some people use it to help their babies nap or fall asleep without rocking, and in this case it can be used earlier (baby still wakes at night for feed but it is easier to lay them down afterwards). I highly recommend the book Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. It is written by a pediatrician who specializes in sleep and really helped me understand newborn and infant sleep patterns. The ladies on this forum recommended it when mine were little and it helped immensely!

A dream feed mainly comes into play after your babies start to drop feeds at night. When they are feeding every 3 hours it doesn't matter but many babies will start sleeping a stretch of 5-6 hours and it always seems that they do that right after being put down for the night. The dreamfeed can help switch the long stretch to later. We started ours on a dream feed about 2-3 months. They would go to bed at 7, we would dreamfeed at 11, and then they would sleep until 6 or 7 instead of waking at 2 AM for a feed.

 

I guess for a dream feed you have o be using bottles? We are not really using bottles now that my milk in well established and both babies are nursing well. We have used CIO (didn't know that was what it was called) with all our kids and it has worked great. They never needed pacifiers and would go to sleep with out problems. Even at 2 1/2 weeks we use it to an extent after we feed, burp change etc and they are just tired. We don't let them fuss a lot or long but they do fall asleep well after a few minutes. I will use it more as they get older.

 

I breast feed for our dream feed.

 

How do you do it? I mean I know how you do it lol but how do you get them to latch when they are asleep? I have a hard enough time waking my DS to nurse and once he is out the only way he will eat again is if I stick a bottle of EBM in his mouth.