7 week old will not sleep please help 😭😭😭

[PonchoIsNotMyName]

Tonight has been the worst night yet, he's been wide awake and miserable since 7pm and DH has just taken him for a drive in the car as a last ditch resort. He settles to sleep during the day fine - pretty much only in the sling. At night it is a different story, it takes hours to settle him, even in the sling, even co sleeping. He's been swaddled, white noise, dummy, sleeping bags, dark room, on me, not on me, pram, bouncer, all the colic relief type meds - literally EVERYTHING you can think of and he will not settle, he just screams and you can see how exhausted he is but he will not sleep. I have tried shorter wake windows, longer wake windows, nothing. He is EBF but will not feed to sleep (neither would my eldest, I don't know how I have managed to produce two EBF babies who won't fall asleep on the boob!!!).

The only thing I haven't yet tried is a bottle of formula which I'm loathe to do in case it upsets his tummy.

Any words of wisdom? Thus far he settles OK DURING the night but getting him to sleep in the first place at night is awful.

My two pennies worth? He's over tired so wired, hence not being able to settle and sleep. The solution...well 15 years on and I'm still searching for dd!
Two things that helped but certainly weren't a 'cure all', I stopped all caffeinated drinks by midday, and would often end up so exhausted I'd fall asleep with her, but if I then woke up, she'd wake up too😲😤😢.
At least now she doesn't disturb the rest of us, but urgh I never want to revert to baby or toddler days.
Sorry OP not terribly helpful!

Sending hugs op we have all been there. It does get better..... eventually x

I’ve got one of these children - absolutely shattered but will not switch off and go to sleep, interestingly he is actually higher on the sleep need end of the scale and needs a lot of help to sleep (opposite to my first).

I find it gets harder to get to him sleep the more
tired he is (obviously has to be tired enough to
sleep) so you have to find the exact right time and tiredness amount and it leads to a lot of long, exhausting evenings. Tbh it is more luck than anything else if I get it right and it certainly doesn’t happen often.

Sorry no advice, but just so you know you aren’t alone and it is truly exhausting when they are like that. It will get better x

We had a baby like this apart from he would only sleep on us. So the only way forward is to divide and conquer. One of us would go to bed 8pm-1am and the other have the baby.
Other person would do 1pm-6am. Then if needed we would have 90 minutes each after that.
We probably did this from 2 weeks old until 10 weeks when my husband returned to work.
It was brutal but the only way to cope and we look back fondly on our snuggly nights even though they were tortuous at the time

Just to add during our shift we would do a mix of the following:

• go out for pram or sling walk
• go for a drive
• cuddle baby and watch boxsets
• attempt to get baby settle in rocking pram (this would gain ten minutes)

What about the three b's bath, bottle and bed.

He could be teething? Maybe a tiny little bit of calpol because they can teeth earlier than expected.

Does her hiccup much? Is he does, that's a sign of silent reflux x

My children were all like this as babies. Our solution with numbers 2 & 3 was that my husband would take the baby out (in all weathers) in the sling at bedtime with the white noise on full on his phone. Eventually they would wind down and fall asleep, and the walking got him fit....
It sounds like your baby is massively overtired but I have no solutions apart from the above because mine were very similar, and just wanted to be awake at that time. I think you just need to ride it out. In a month's time it will all change again.

Honestly? Colic isn’t it. You will try 100 things and eventually he will settle and you will likely have no idea what the problem was. I do think some babies can become a little bit day/night muddled, so no nap post 4pm can help. But overall it likely is just time unfortunately

I saw this randomly and couldn't pass by. My son is 12 now and was the worst. Worst. Worst. Worst sleeper ever. I don't know if you need to hear this, but I PROMISE you it will get better. I thought I was going to go crazy, or die, or both. People all around you will tell you how well their kid sleeps. You will feel like you must be doing shit wrong: you are not. Source: me, with two shit sleepers and one that just settled like a dream. I did nothing different. Hang in there, you've got this.

Scrap a 7pm bedtime. Setting yourself for failure there. It’s classic colicky witching hour. Aim for 11pm. Film, snacks, Baby bjjorn bouncer, Bed tilt, dummy, Infacol.

He just screams. I don't try to put him to bed at 7, it's just he clearly wants to go to sleep. He won't sit happily in the bouncer while we watch netflix.

He shows no signs of reflux. None. He's absolutely fine in the day.

I will admit I think reflux is massively overdiagnosed and I don't love the idea of a tiny baby having a PPI when not medically necessary.

I can't see that a baby who gains weight well, isn't in discomfort when feeding, is happy and settled during the day (and happy to be on his back as a general rule of thumb), is happy otherwise at night after he finally settles initially (I'm just up to feed now and he's fed happily and gone back to sleep), and doesn't vomit beyond normal baby spit up has any reason to be diagnosed with reflux and given omeprazole. To me the obvious answer is he's massively overtired. I just don't know how to overcome that tbh. There's obviously a sweet spot somewhere I'm missing, I just don't know what it is.

Do you have an automatic baby swing?

We actually don't.

If you've tried absolutely everything, I'd personally employ a sleep consultant for a couple of nights to save my sanity. They will have worked with this issue many times before

The pp who said leave the baby the hell alone is right, imo.

I obviously don't mean cry it out but constant feeding, jiggling, into the car, into the pram is probably stressing him out and making him hugely overstimulated. Put him in the cot in a dark room, lay on the floor/bed next to him in silence and time 10 minutes. He might just conk.

Oh sending sympathy! We used to call it the witching hours.
i agree that he sounds positively wired and overtired.
Have you tried leaving him just for a few mins? as per PP above, my eldest hated being rocked/fussed/touched when she was tired and just needed to be swaddled and left. (she protested at being swaddled but we persevered)
She would cry for less than a minute and then start to wind down (grumble a bit) and go to sleep. Still like it now at 20! Just needs to have no stimuli around her in the evenings!
another thing we found worked was to put her down an hour earlier, before we got to witching hours- yes this meant she was going off to bed at 6pm which was too early but we gradually managed to switch this round as this phase passed. We were able to just put her down this way independently after a bath and feed. I realise this is tea time etc but if she is around to deal with older child it might just help get through these next few weeks and stop the cycle of overtired evenings?

Hey OP, sounds tough but very normal. Have a read up on ‘purple crying’

We try this every night and it doesn't work just makes him hysterical.

At 7 weeks I doubt there's any point. 7 months maybe.

I would suggest the opposite, start bedtime 2 hours from his last wake.Boob, Bath, massage, boob ( in the dark) and down. Give him 10 minutes to settle. Consistency is key.

Does he sleep enough during the day? Clutching at straws, but I found that my son would settle better at night if he was less overtired - as in at least a 2 hour nap, 3 hours even better. My ds did have reflux, so day/night made no difference - any long nap times as precious as gold dust.

If he does sleep in the day then seriously you sleep too for as long as you can.

Although ds was probably older when nap times got longer - I think I've blocked the early days out for my own sanity