My baby girl is 18 weeks and after the initial newborn cluster feeding nightmare she actually slept through the night from about 8.30 - 5ish which was great. However for about the last 7 or so weeks she has been waking for a feed, generally around 3ish but can vary. I don't really mind the feed as I know waking once in the night really isn't bad at all but 90% of the time she will not settle after this feed. She is breast fed and always falls asleep on the breast anyway and will quite happily sleep there for s long as I hold her there. But when I put her down in her cot she at first seems dozey likes she's going to drift back off, but she is kicking her legs in the air and chewing her fingers. However rather than gradually settling herself to sleep she seems to gradually become more awake, and then she will start making this new grunting type sound which she has just discovered she can make and its then that I know that I've had it! This will eventually turn in to a cry.
I always switch her white noise sheep on but this doesn't seem to help. I've tried rocking her (which I wanted to avoid so that she learns to self soothe) but this doesn't help. I do the normal things like keep the room as dark as possible, minimise eye contact etc etc. I've tried doing a dream feed before I go to bed but this didn't seem to make a difference.
A sure fire way of getting some more sleep is to bring her in bed with me and have her on top of me feeding and we both doze back off. We do this every morning anyway so that I can get a couple more hours sleep in but I really feel that doing this from 3 am is just too long ideally as its not the best quality of sleep. I had to do this from 1am the other night and my shoulder ached the next morning too
She really doesn't nap much during the day either - she just has really short cat naps after feeds, unless I take her out in the carrier and she'll sleep for longer, or if we drive somewhere.
Any ideas anyone?
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4 month old won't go back to sleep after night feeds!
5 replies
LMonkey · 12/07/2015 00:16
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