Newborn sleep!

[SleepBecomesHim321]

My 1 week old is asleep most of day (waking for feeds) but up every hour in the night. Breastfed, weight, nappies all fine.

Is there anything I can do to start encouraging a reversal of this pattern or is it really a case of going with it for now? I'm really struggling with the lack of more than 20-30 mins sleep at a time.

Thanks.

I was in the same boat 3 weeks ago.

It's time.

4 week old now will go 4 hour stretches at night. Was 1 hour which was a killer but is improving day by day.

Hang in there! Will slowly improve.

You will sleep again

Sounds normal to me, sorry! With my 9 week old we are encouraging feeds in the day (sometimes waking to feed on my midwife's advice at about 4 weeks) and then it is improving her sleep at night, but when baby is so small I would discuss with your HV / midwife before stretching feeds like that. Sounds like you are doing a great job xx

It does just take time. I think it was about 2 weeks with mine.

Do things in the night as quietly as you can, with lights dimmed, no talking to baby etc.

During the day, let them nap under a window with the curtain open, lots of talking, eye contact etc. I used to play gentle music in the house too.

They do get the hang of it eventually.

Congrats OP

Sounds like all 3 of mine. Hang on in there, it does get better. At about 12 weeks, mine went from Moses baskets to a cot and we really started a night time ritual of bath, book, bottle/boob, bed at about about 7 o'clock. I'd also put them in their cot awake, with a mobile tinkling above them. I'd give them a feed abou

Cont... 11 o'clock to see them through the night.

Maybe it was luck, but I had really good sl

Wtf.... my phone keeps posting even though I'm not pressing post!!

Anyway, this routine worked really well for my kids. Putting them to bed awake from an early age and keeping to it as just a fact, worked on my 3 and I've never had bedtime problems.

Never had them sleep in my bed overnight. Morning cuddles in bed though.

Congratulations, these first few weeks are tough, but pass too fast. Your newborn will never be as small as he/she is now. Mine are grown up, I can still remember those little snufflers on my shoulder. 🥰

You could try waking him in the day to stop him doing the longer sleep cycles then. I usually woke my DS and fed him when it got to 3 hours since the last feed - that meant he fed more in the day, which stopped him getting as hungry at night, and it stopped him sleeping too long in the day. I found DS did one longer sleep cycle every 24 hours and so I tried to push that into night time. Might be worth a go!

Mine were NICU babies and put into a feeding routine straight away. They were on two hourly feeds and as they got bigger they stretched it to 3 and then 4. They gave larger amounts at these feeds but kept the overall volume the same.

I'm not sure how you would do that with breastfeeding though. Mine had expressed breastmilk and then formula which made it easy to know how much they were having.