Sleep advice

[mandy2013]

Dear parents
Happy new year!
Greatly appreciate any recommendations on sleep books/ consultant/ website?
My baby is 3 months old. He still waking up at night 2-3 times
I tried to follow Gina Ford but found her too strict?

At 3 months old your baby should be waking 2-3 times per night for a feed. His stomach is so small still he won’t be able to sleep the whole night.

That sounds entirely normal! Night feeds are normal for months to come.

At 3 months waking 3 times a night is really good. Many normal babies are feeding every 2-3h at that age and many others just want held regardless of hunger.

I wish my 6 month old would only wake up 2-3 times a night.

My third so I reckon I have read every rule, advice, etc out there. At 3 months baby is too young to sleep train or night wean so not sure what you're hoping for.

Only thing you can try is refining naps so that you follow maximum awake times to ensure baby isn't overtired at night, make sure nap lengths/times are appropriate so baby not overtired and to work on good sleep habits and a consistent bedtime routine.

Then reassess at 6 months.

If you haven't read up on any of those things yet then before the 4 month sleep regression might be helpful to see if you can avoid some of the dependencies (not that it helped me).

Good luck, I know it sucks but you will get through it (even when it feels like you can't.

I very loosely did GF, just to have an idea of sleep and feed times. I ignored a lot of stuff in the book like I let baby sleep in the pram or bouncer, gave a dummy etc but overall the routines worked really well. Come bedtime baby was just the right level of tired to sleep but not overtired. They weren’t hungry as they’d taken the bulk of their calories during the day. Both slept through at around 12 weeks old with a 7pm bedtime, dreamfeed around 10/11, back down in the cot until 7am. But I do think that I got lucky with good sleepers, that they were naturally that way inclined and it didn’t take much to get the routine to work- even from birth they were happy to be put down in the cot and only ever had 1 feed during the night. Your baby does sound normal OP, by all means start a routine but I wouldn’t be resorting to a sleep consultant just yet.