Advice for 11 week old please

[theresaplaceforus]

Hoping that @FATEdestiny will see this and be able to offer me some advice/help and of course anyone else that has some suggestions.
Baby is 11 weeks. She CAN sleep well because she’s doing a couple of nights of 7 hour stretches but that seems to have vanished now. She is very very difficult to put down at night and it’s often up to 2 hours before she actually falls asleep which then is getting closer to her needing a feed. I do a bath, bed clothes, feed, quiet time routine and dimly lit room. She will fall asleep in arms but then wake once put down, have tried putting her down drowsy but she doesn’t fall asleep, doesn’t really fuss just is awake. A bedtime routine that starts at 8 ends up with not falling asleep until 11 and she’s now waking 2/3 hours later to be fed.
She is formula fed now with one bottle of breast milk a day, she has about 150-180ml each feed usually 4 hours apart in the day and longer at night.
Just desperately want to get her down to sleep at a reasonable time and now have to pick her up/put her down several times. This morning I felt at breaking point. This combination with covid tier 4 is really upsetting me.

[Thatwentbadly]

Honestly if you have such a tiny baby who occasionally does 7 hours stretches you have a unicorn baby. Remember just because they have done a long stretch of sleep on a previous night does not mean they are capable of that every night.

[theresaplaceforus]

I know the length of some of the stretches that she has done is great I’m looking for advice for how to reduce the amount of time it actually takes to get her down as it is almost breaking me. Even when she has done the long sleeps it’s a long process to get her down to sleep.

[FATEdestiny]

Hiya. It's taking ages because you're trying to put her down already asleep.

That works during the fourth trimester when sleep is passive, but past 3-4 months is when baby needs to start learning to go to sleep where she stays asleep.

One way to achieve this is to embrace cosleeping. Then baby goes to sleep being cuddled close and stays there is night. This removes the need to put an already asleep baby into the cot.

The other way is to help baby to go to sleep (from awake) in the cot and not in your arms. There are literally dozens of different ways to achieve this depending on your parenting style; some harsh and some gentle and everything in between. But all sleep training methods work on the basis of teaching baby to go to sleep in the cot, because going to sleep in your arms and then being put down already asleep isn't sustainable going forward from 4 months.

As to how you go about teaching baby to sleep independently in the cot - well that's a long post in itself. At this very young age I would not want to do anything that causes any distress for baby. As such I consider a dummy as essential for independant sleep. Because baby won't cry when actively sucking and sucking is a natural comforter for little ones.

Without a dummy, independant sleep will involve crying. There's no question about that, it WILL involve crying and distress to some degree.

So the #1 question to ask yourself here is to weigh up your priorities between:

• accepting cosleeping
• establishing dummy use for independant sleep
• accepting crying and distress (you and baby) to teach independant sleep
• maintaining the status quo and doing nothing, but accepting you'll need to in the future.