To think I'm making life difficult for myself, or is parenting just this hard??

[AliceAbsolum]

DD is 4 months next week. Ebf. Every evening after about 5pm she's very unsettled. Screams the house down. I think she would happily go to bed at 6pm because she's over tired, but 1, it's against SIDs advice to have her upstairs and 2, she can never fall asleep alone anyway. If she's not in the pram or carseat she will only breastfeed to sleep.
So I end up going to bed at 7pm just to stop the screaming. But I don't like it as I want to actually see DH and have an evening. Let alone when it's going to be light and warm outside.
What would we do if we had other kids?
Am I missing something here?

we had the pram in our living room so I’d feed to sleep, transfer to pram, rock it a bit and then put a snooze shade on it till I went up to bed with the baby.

I keep my 4 month with me downstairs until I’m ready for bed. Sometimes he sleeps in his Moses basket, sometimes me or DH hold him. Then we change and offer milk as soon as we go to bed.

I think some babies just have a witching hour in the evenings. Maybe a build up of gas or overstimulated from a fun day? My oldest used to settle better after a massage with baby oil (we did a class but you should be able to find a guide online). It used to help get loads of farts out too! If your living room is quite bright, you could try a different lamp and see if that makes a difference. Try and make the room cosy. Good luck, it honestly doesn’t last forever

Nobody died.

What about all the babies that did, and do still, in fact, die as a result of SIDS from not following safe sleep advice?

Ridiculous thing to say.

I went to bed early with my DD for a long time. It's hard to remember exactly but I'm pretty sure it went on over 4 months.

It is totally understandable that you want some evening time. That used to be the thing that wound me up the most. That because I was EBF I was the one who had to disappear at 8pm.

It will pass.

Posted too soon.

OP I have a 4 month old DD and am in the same predicament myself. Sometimes I go to bed with her really early and use that time to go on my phone etc, sometimes like lots of others on the thread I’ll feed her to sleep and ‘start’ her bedtime in the living room and just transfer for a feed/nappy change and into sleeping bag whenever we’re going to bed.

Don't be fooled into thinking you should be in a routine by now, and she should be sleeping X amount of hours. No baby has read a parenting book!

Do what works for you. I never tried to get mine off to sleep at that age - they went to bed at 9ish, with me, we co-slept. Sometimes I'd read for a bit, sometimes I wouldn't.

Also remember 4 months is classic for cluster feeding.

Above all - it will pass. She's still tiny.

Ours slept downstairs with 1 of us when small and then in the cot upstairs when in a regular sleeping pattern.

If you didn't smoke during pregnancy, don't smoke now, and put baby on their back then I would just put them to bed upstairs if they'll go and then go down and enjoy your evening.

This thread is a great example of why breastfeeding rates are so dreadful.

4 month old breastfed babies are meant to behave like this in the evenings. It’s not a problem to be fixed.

It does get better @AliceAbsolum it’s linked to a sleep regression and growth spurt phase. It does pass.

I think this massively overstates the risk. Around 200 babies a year in the UK (out of around 700,000) die of SIDS; of course that's 200 too many but that has to be seen in context. The huge contributing risk factors within maternal control are smoking (present in nearly 90% of SIDS cases) and the baby sleeping in unsafe positions or on unsafe surfaces. Sleeping alone all night - let alone for a portion of it - is actually considered to be a risk factor because of quite a weak correlation, and there is only a hypothetical mechanism for why this might be - no one actually knows that it does increase the risk and if so why.

If people want to be absolutely as cautious as they can be, and they find that for them that's compatible with good maternal mental health (which is actually a known and proven huge factor in child outcomes) then great and good, but I think it's really alarmist to say that not doing so is 'gambling with your child's life'.

I remember this OP, I was EBF too and my child just wanted to sleep ON me. I used to have to slowly put her next to me. We were in a flat though, the bedroom next to the living room, so could sneak out. But I remember having dinner in bed and listening to a lot of audiobooks/music/podcasts or watching tv on our laptops in bed! It doesn’t
last forever. You’re not doing anything wrong.

That's EBF for ya..

I didn't see my husband for 6 months with a newborn.

I mean he was in the house, but I was in bed nursing the baby. He was very useful at bringing me cups of tea.

I miss those days. The newborn is now a maniac toddler.

OP, you should still be under the care of your health visitor- why don’t you ask them for advice? I don’t know what the current guidelines are, but they will.
I always had my babies in the living room with me, in the snooze pod and then transferred them to cot when I went to bed (up until they were 6months)

I actually think telling people that this is the only way if you breastfeed isn't great for breastfeeding rates. I remember looking at my local La Leche League Facebook page and being terrified with all the tales of two year olds who slept on the boob, 'if you breastfeed that's your whole and only job', etc. - it's probably the most seriously I ever considered giving up breastfeeding very early on.

And if you'd had another child, would you still have just taken to your bed for six months...?

it's against SIDs advice to have her upstairs

It's advice not a binding law presumably. When did parents lose the ability to make their own decisions? Remember, the 'advice' you're being given is only current thinking, it will probably change over time.

At 4 months, I always found the witching hour(s) were hell. 4pm-9pm for mine. It seemed like YEARS at the time, but actually it passed very quickly when I look back objectively.

The absolutely huge impact here is back sleeping - this is proven without a shadow of a doubt. Unlike lone sleeping, where the data is messy and the correlation is weak. For instance, the Netherlands has one of the lowest SIDS rates in Europe but the majority (by some way) of babies don't room share even from birth.

Again, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from room sharing at all times if they want to be as cautious as possible and if it works for them - it doesn't seem to work for the OP so telling her that it would be a massive risk to not to do it is, I think, unhelpful.

My baby is the exact same OP (also. 4 months), I either watch TV downstairs and she feeds to sleep and then we go upstairs, do her nappy and put her in her little bag whilst she's still sleepy and has another feed to sleep. Or if I'm tired I just chill in bed after tea and tiktok or mumsnet (I'm pretty sure it's melted my brain though). We don't usually finish tea til around 8.30 though. Dp will bring me a cuppa and sweet treat up which is nice.

Get the huckleberry app and track all sleeps. It’ll help you with timings if you think she’s overtired. Like others we had baby downstairs in bassinet or asleep on me for the eve. DH would cut up my dinner into pieces so I could eat it with a spoon and one hand! 😂 we had tv on and chatted then all went upstairs around 10pm. If she screams downstairs she will scream upstairs so I don’t see why you need to be upstairs.

I think for me it took about 8 months before I got some of my evenings back. It will happen. In the meantime, if all else fails get some decent headphones and watch some good films or documentaries.

I've said this before. I work in a mother and baby unit and all parents are encouraged to settle their babies in theirs rooms and then just keep the baby monitors with them. This is from far younger than 6 months.

If you EBF then this is the deal really. A few on here telling you their child sleeps in a crib in the living room/next to a pneumatic drill are definitely the exception, not the rule.