What is a Snooze Button Feeding?
How many of you set alarms in the morning, only to hit the snooze button for another little bit of sleep? How many times do you hit that button? (For me, it would be a lot haha).
Sometimes our babies wake up earlier than you’d prefer to be awake (and honestly, they may not be ready either)!
So, you may feed them in order to get a little more sleep out of them (ie hitting the snooze button to extend sleep). Thus: snooze button feeding (I might have made up this term, I’m not totally sure haha).
You don’t really expect them to sleep a TON more after this feeding, just enough to get to a slightly later wake up (like 6:30-7:30am for example).
Typically this feeding occurs between 5-6am during an early morning wake up. It could be earlier or later, just depending on your child’s wake up time and your goals but really, anything before 5am would be a normal overnight waking/feeding typically and anything after 5am is an early waking/snooze button feeding.
This snooze button feeding is also not usually a FULL feeding (either because they’ve already eaten overnight) or because you want their full feeding to be when you start the day and not at 5am.
How do you know if the snooze button is working? If it works, your child will go back to sleep easily and sleep until a normal circadian rhythm wake up.
If it doesn’t work, they’ll either stay awake happily/unhappily or they may fall asleep but only for a short period of time/wake when you transfer them. They may also require you to hold them to stay asleep even after feeding (this can work if you don’t mind it).
What if you want to stop the snooze button feeding? This is a perfectly valid choice when you’re also ready to sleep past 5am. In the case of weaning the feeding, you can do it like any other feeding/early wake up. Here are three blogs you can read to solve this:
If you need help with independent sleep and weaning feedings, check out the 1:1 options here!
