We’re at our wits end, please help if you can. Our little girl is 14 weeks old and has pretty much always been a terrible sleeper unless cuddled on us. Over the past few weeks her naps seem to have shortened (even when cuddled on us) and vary from 20 minutes to 2.5 hours. And now she won’t even go down at night.
Yesterday evening she refused to go down for longer than 5 minutes at 6pm and stayed awake (despite our efforts) till gone 10pm - she wasn’t actually that grizzly surprisingly. (Her bedtime is anywhere from 8.15pm - 9.30pm) Then we settled her to sleep (holding and rocking her), put her in the bedside crib as usual and as soon as she touched the mattress she was whinging loudly so we left her and just rocked the crib and after a few minutes she just started screaming so we lifted her up and did the whole process over and over. She’s never been a fantastic night sleeper but has often done a longer stretch to start with of around 4 hours but last night she only did 2 hours in the crib to start and then was up every 30 minutes after that until we finally gave in through sheer exhaustion at 4.30 am and took it in turns to have her on our chests and she slept peacefully for 3 hours!!!
- she’s exclusively breastfed
- wake hours tend to be between 1.25 and 2 hours
- we have bedtime routine of story, bath, feed in the dark and then bed
- we use white noise, cool and dark room
- we do have to rock her to sleep in our arms, tried putting her down drowsy but she just screams even when patting/shushing and crib rocking
- she went through a patch at 2.5 months old of only waking twice in the night and doing 5-6 hour stretches to start the night (although it has always been sketchy after that first stretch has she is often very whingy)
- we are slightly reluctant to let her cry for an extended period of time because she’s so young
- her naps in the day if we’re lucky enough that she goes down are around 20-35 mins and when holding her they can be 25-150 mins