12 week old awake all day

[riddles26]

I was wondering if anyone could offer me sleep advice for my 12 week old daughter who is ebf. She has been a good night sleeper since 6-7 weeks, sleeps a 6-8 hour stretch followed by a 2-3 hour stretch. She developed this pattern on her own and gradually increased the long stretch of sleep.

My problem is she does not sleep during the day. She is really cheerful and playful after waking up in the morning and then gets harder and harder to handle as she is tired and grumpy but does not want to sleep. Ive tried catching her as soon as I see sleepy cues, putting her down upstairs and downstairs, sleeping with her, rocking her to sleep on me but she just resists sleep. She will have a light nap 10-20 minute nap in the pram but I need to walk for over an hour before she sleeps. She will succumb to the tiredness early in the evening but then I need to limit her nap time so I can bathe her and put her down for the night. The few times she has had a 2-3 hour nap during the day, she has been happier and slept normally at night too.

I'm not sure how to handle this as she does all the right things at night - falls asleep, self settles if she wakes up etc. I'm getting really worried for her development with such little sleep - a baby this age should not be able to stay awake for 8+ consecutive hours but she does this more often than not!

Can anyone offer any advice?

[FATEdestiny]

Baby is likely to need a lot more sleep during the daytime. More frequent feeds too. The idea is that you anticipate sleep. Tired signs actuslly mean over tired and baby wanted to be aslerp half an hour earlier, at least.

A reasonable aporoximation at 12 weeks would be baby wants about an hour awake between one nap and the next through the daytime.

I have just wrote another post about how sleep changes at around 3-4 months old. The OP in this thread is formula feeding so ignore the stuff about feeding, but later explains the nature of sleep biology at this age:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/sleep/2835517-12-week-daytime-routine-am-I-doing-something-wrong

[riddles26]

Thanks so much for your reply. I completely agree she probably needs a lot more sleep, I just don’t know how to get her to go to sleep.

She feeds frequently - every 1-1.5hours when awake. I have tried putting her to sleep at fixed times - 1 hour after waking, 2 hours etc and have also tried when happy before she is tired and have tried following her cues - all result in her screaming and crying because she doesn’t want to sleep. She goes down without any fuss at night, I just don’t know how to get her to do the same during the day. Ive tired a dummy but she refuses it. I would be happy to feed her to sleep, or let her sleep on me for now as long as she just sleeps!

This has been a problem since she was tiny - when she was 3 weeks, she would be awake for 5 hour stretches but feeding during most of it so I put it down to cluster feeding and having naps mid feed because it was tiring for her (she used to be a very slow feeder).

Can you offer any advice on how to get her to go to sleep?

[FATEdestiny]

Can you offer any advice on how to get her to go to sleep?

Sucking is naturally soothing. Feeding to sleep or dummy.

Movement is also universally used to get babies sleeping - bouncy chair, pushchair, car ride, sling walk, rocking in arms.

Then mimicing the tight, secure, calm, environment of the womb. Swaddle, cosleeping, darkened room, white noise.

Personally I favour the bouncy chair and dummy aporoach for daytime naps. Limiting awake time to 40 ish minutes and allowing 20 minutes of relentless bouncing and dummy holding-in to get baby to sleep.