Should i dream feed?

My twins are just over 8 weeks old (they were 38 weekers). We put them down at 8 pm and wake up is around 7 to 8 am. . DS wakes up usually around 2 am and 5 am for feedIngs. DD up at 12, 3, and 5 for feedings. I know others do a dream feed around 10 or 11 pm i guess to 'reset' the first feeding and try to get feedings synced up with parents bedtime. Im wondering if i should try a dream feed to push their next feeding back later so we can get more sleep closer to our bedtime. DS is a big eater and i think he'd eat but DD is more finicky and im not sure how much we'd get her to take.

Anyone try to initiate a dream feed? Looking for both success stories and those that werent successful. At what age did you initiate it if successful. Thanks.

 

Personally, I'm not a fan of waking a child up and basically making them eat. Just doesn't sit well with me. I'm more of an on demand person. With my luck, I'd never get them back to sleep or they'd wake up an hour later anyway.

 

I've done a dream feed with Emmett since birth. It's very rare for him to wake now for it. I just pick him up, nurse him laying down & then put him back to bed. I usually (although not always) get a long stretch of 5-6 hours after that.

We did a bottled dream feed with the girls starting at around 3 months old. After the first couple of nights they stopped waking & just ate in their sleep. Again, we would then get a long stretch after. Sometimes up to 7 hours. Around 6-7 months they dropped the early morning feed & went from 10:30/11:00pm to 7:00am. At 9 months, when they were consistently getting 3 solids meals a day, we dropped the dream feed.

 

This is how I always felt. I did always feed them both at the same time, so I guess I did wake one when the other woke (although generally I didn't need to). I know others have had success with dream feeds, so I'm sure you will get good advice. I just never saw the benefit.

 

My boys got into a really bad habit around 2 months old of taking their longest stretch of sleep from around 6 or 7pm until about 11pm, then they would also need to eat again around 5am. I tried to make myself go to bed after their evening feeding, but I just couldn't sleep well in that 7pm-10pm window when my body really wanted to go to sleep around 10 or 10:30. Staying up until they woke around 11pm meant I didn't get in bed until close to midnight. Add that on top of getting up at 5am for another feed, and I was EXHAUSTED.

So, we started waking them at 9:30pm for a dream feed, and I would go to bed immediately after. That way they were eating again around 4 or 4:30am until they were able to stop eating at night. That really helped with the sleep. (They didn't totally STTN until 9.5 months, but at least when we were up it was only for a few minutes at a time for a binky, etc. and DH and I would take turns). We did a dream feed until they were around 7-8 months, when I was confident they could make it all night without a bottle.

 

We fed on demand for the first few months (except that when one was hungry, we fed the other as well) At 4 mos old, our boys' long stretch of sleep was still from about 5:30p-2 or 3am when they woke up to eat, so our pediatrician suggested doing a dream feed before we go to bed or somehow get another feeding in during the day to see if it would help eliminate the 2am feeding. We only did the dream feed for 2 nights--I didn't like waking them up and I ended up sticking that feeding in later in the afternoon and pushed their bedtime a little later and they immediately stopped waking up at 2 or 3 and were able to go to the next feeding at 5 or so. They've been doing that ever since.

eagleswings216: it might not have been a bad habit--i read that babies tend to have a long stretch then because that is their time of deepest sleep.

 

Well, we tried the dream feed for three nights last week and it didn't really work. Yes they did wake up later in the night than they would have if we hadn't dream fed, but it wasn't the same amount later - DD was getting an almost 6 hr stretch of sleep after bed time at 7:30 but with dream feed near 11 PM he only got 4 hour stretch afterwards. We may try it again in a couple months

praises - what time did you move your bed time to when the dream feed worked? Also you added an extra feeding in early afternoon before 5:30?

 

Between 6 and 6:30. Like you said, when we did the dream feed, it kinda worked but not really, so that was why I figured we might as well do an extra feeding during the day instead of in the evening. It was kind of difficult to cram 6 feedings in during the "day" as opposed to 5 and 1 in the middle of the night, but it was a trade off. Their feedings had to be closer together so that I didn't end up with 2 feedings right on top of each other. At 5 months they could eat more at one time, so it went down to 5 feedings. I think they could've done that a little sooner, but we had to go out of town and I didn't want to try something new yet.
They now have their last bottle at 6:30 and go down at 6:45 so they're asleep by 7 and wake up between 5 and 6 for their first bottle and we put them back down and they'll sleep for another hr, hr and a half.

 

Maybe so, but it was a horrible thing for my sanity and sleep!

I know dream feeds don't work for everyone, but they helped us get more sleep for awhile and didn't reduce the amount of night sleep for my kids (which was admittedly very low at that age - they woke up a LOT due to reflux, etc.). At that point I would have stood on my head and sung Yankee Doodle if I thought it would get me more sleep. Lol.

 

I do one. I aim to do it between 10 pm and 12 am, but they often wake to eat around 10 pm, so I'll do another one at 12 before I go to bed. All my kids sleep during the night time though, so it's easy to get them back down after eating, if they wake up at all.

 

I think I tried the dream feed (at 10pm) like twice and they woke up an hour later anyway so I gave it up. But in saying that, I did feed one after the other and quite often they didn't wake up during the feed so I guess that was like a dream feed. Feeding one after the other set up our routine and from then on they just woke one after the other, first at 2am then 5am and it wasn't long before they stopped 11pm then the 2am altogether. Around the same time we moved their bedtime from 7.30 to 6pm (now it's 5.30).