What have peoples experiences been? Do they work like they say they do?! We didn't do with our first but she slept really well from day 1. These two sleep pretty well too I think (currently going down at 630pm-7pm) and are doing a 6-7 hour stretch but I'd love that stretch to start when I go to bed! My one worry is we'll start it and it'll become a hard 'habit' to break Your expertise are appreciated, I'm new to this!
I have not been able to make this work, with my singletons I found it made no difference when I stopped, they slept just as long without it so I gave up, with the twins it has just meant they have added an extra feed which I suspect is just habit and they have kept waking just as they did without it. Lots of people swear by it though so good luck whatever you decide!!! Hope that makes sense, I can't seem to get my words in the right order today!!
I never had any luck with a dream feed. My experience was that they rarely drank enough while they were half asleep to make it worth while. If I accidentally woke them up, then sleep for the rest of the night was ruined. Like your kids, my kids' long stretch of sleep was from 7pm-2am. Anything I did to extend that just made their sleep worse. I just followed their schedule and fed them when they woke on their own.
I did it with the twins and it helped for the time I did it. I think I started when I had to go back to work and really needed any extra sleep I could get. It wasn't a hard habit to break but I didn't do it long either - just until they started sleeping longer stretches at night.
Our kids were bad about taking their long stretch of sleep starting at 7pm, too. I tried for awhile to go to bed when they did myself, and I just couldn't do it. They would go to sleep at 7pm, then be up again at midnight, than again at like 5am, and it was killer. After awhile, we started waking them for a dream feed around 10pm and then they would make it most nights until 4am. That way I was getting 5 hours of sleep when my body would actually sleep. We did dream feeds from about 2 months-8 months, then we were able to drop it. Dream feeds don't seem to work for everyone, but they really helped us.
