First time mum - needs help with 3 month old sleep pattern!

[Premmiemom]

Hi mums, I'm a first time mum to a 3 month old. She was premature and came 7 weeks early. She spent 5 weeks in neonatal and came home in an amazing routine. In order to ensure she gained weight, we had to wake her every 4 hours to bottle feed her.

At night time she was really sleepy so I stretched the feeds out at night and she slept through! How lucky am I? We stuck to the 4 hourly feeds during the day which worked fine.

Now as my baby is awake more during the day, it means at the usual feeding times she's falling asleep so they need to change. I've tried letting her sleep and feed when she looks fed. But now she's dropped a feed during the day and stopped sleeping through the night.

I tried increasing the feeds during the day to cover the missed bottle but she's not interested and is still only taking 5 oz.

Please send help?! What do I do?

I fed DS every 3 hours during the day once he started sleeping through. Or you could try a dream feed in the evening.

Firstly, congratulations on the birth of your little girl - I am sure you are doing a wonderful job of being a mum.

Secondly - about the sleep and feeding pattern - I would be led by her, and go back to giving her a feed during the night when she wakes up.

If I have understood it correctly, because she was premature, as far as her milestones are concerned, her age should be adjusted to take account of her prematurity, and in some ways she will be more like the age she should be now, if she'd been born on her due date, than her current chronological age - so it might help to think of her more as a 5 week old baby than a 12 week old one - and most 5-week-old babies are still having at least one night time feed.

It may also be that she is having a growth spurt, and needs more feeds, and that is partly why she is waking at night.

I think it also helps not to look for patterns - in my experience, as soon as I got used to a pattern of behaviour from one of my babies (I have three boys, now all in their 20s), the little blighter went and changed the pattern! I found it was easier to go with the flow, and not to worry too much about whether they were sticking to the pattern or not.

Hi ladies, thank you so much for coming back to me. The structured feeding times work sometimes, if she's awake for them. That's where I'm struggling. When's she's fast asleep, I need to wake her and it's a battle to get her to take it.

You're right about her corrected age too. In theory she shouldn't really be sleeping through the night but should be up looking for feeds. Our last bottle is at 11pm and she will sleep through to 7.30am.

My HV is lovely, but I can't get a straight answer anywhere. I think because she was premature everyone is afraid to say one way or another what to do. Whether to wake and feed her or feed her on cue.

I'm pleased to say her weight gain is consistent and she is a happy healthy wee woman without any complications. So I know were very very lucky.

I'll go with baby led for another day or 2 and see if I can figure out her patterns.

Thanks so much ladies xo

Just let your baby do what she wants sleep wise fir at least 2 years, don't try to control it, we did that and it was fine. DD age 3 now sleeps 12 hours a night but it took a long time!