To ask for your advice on how to get baby to sleep - please help!

[Springbaby2023]

My 5.5 month old baby will not sleep and has not slept well since 3.5 months. I’ve posted about this before but it’s just getting worse and worse, he’s now up every 30 mins - hour over night. Never does more than an hour.

Last night he was up god knows how many times (it’s usually around 10 when I count) and has now been awake since 4.30th and my three year old will be up any minute. Today will be hell.

I’m at my wits end and can’t think clearly on it because of being so tired.

He has a good nap schedule but is fed to sleep (EBF) which I think is the issue. Also has a dark room, white noise, isn’t too hot/ too cold, has teething medicine, anything you can think of basically. Won’t take a dummy.

As far as I can see I’ve got three options:

1. Wait it out, know it’s a phase and will pass
2. Sleep train
3. Introduce solids to see if that helps (I don’t think it will but MIL swears it will so thought I’d include it)

I honestly go round and round in circles trying to decide what to do and it’s driving me just as mad as the lack of sleep itself. I don’t really want to sleep train but I can’t keep living like this.

Probably opening a can of worms here but has anyone got any advice on what to do? Or even just on how to survive this phase.

This was DD1. We waited it out until I was practically hallucinating with tiredness, then sleep trained.

Our method was to have a really good bedtime regime, then pop back after 2, then 3, then 4 and so on minutes. She We only ever got as far as 5.

That taught her how to go to sleep by herself, and she stopped waking in the night unless she was hungry or needed something. It was magic.

Search for a thread on here called ‘sleep training success’ and there are lots of similar stories.

Weaning did sod all for us, btw.

White noise!

Says they have that in the op

OP this sounds like hell. Is he feeding every time he wakes?

Vote for sleep training.
You'll get the usual "it's cruel" comments at some point, but it's worse for a baby to be chronically over tired and upset than cry for a couple minutes at a time. Sleep helps growth and development. I would start tonight and see how you get on, loads of advice about it online and on here. Good luck op, I hope you have a better night tonight x

DS2 is similar (although not quite as bad) and DP is back to taking him at the start of the night at he'll happily stay asleep on someone. Can confirm that having just started solids all that has happened is that digestion troubles are now added to the list of potential causes of multiple wake ups.

I’d 100% have started weaning before now!

I also sleep trained as was not functioning on zero sleep.

Weaning will make no difference. He has a feed to sleep association so is using boob to link his sleep cycles. You don’t have to do traditional sleep training per se but you do need to stop feeding to sleep and feeding on every wake.

I wouldn't sleep train personally, I just couldn't do it. DD was the same and it improved once we started weaning but got even better when I night weaned her off the boob (she was waking just for boob then back to sleep but it was for comfort not because she was hungry)

I think 5.5 months is too early for night weaning but could look at bottle of formula for bed time?

Yes this! DD went from 8-12 wake ups a night to once a night, no sleep training or leaving her to cry involved

Same with my daughter. She slept so well untill the 4 month sleep regression and hasnt slept well since. She is exclusively breastfed and some nights wakes every 40 minutes to 1 hour and will sometimes have a 1 to 2 hour wake time during the night (split night) she just turned 8 months and has no issues with her weight. She is also having 3 meals a day but i havent noticed a difference.
I think just some babies sleep better than others and i tell myself 'this too shall pass'
I personally wont be sleep training because of what i have researched. I have however found that it gets soo much easier. I can cope now and don't feel like the wreck i did a couple of months ago.
I also find just when i think i cant cope anymore, my baby will have a good night sleep and give me like a 4 hour stretch for instance, which i find gives me enough energy to get through the next stint of shit night sleeps.
Can you partner take your baby downstairs for an hour or two in the morning to give you a little extra? Mine does this when he can and it definitely also helps.
I would say your not alone. And hang in there. It does get easier and one day we will all look back on this and think, wow. Cant believe we had to deal with that! ❤️

How did you do this without sleep training? Did you stop feeding to sleep? This is exactly what I wanted to hear!

Most times. Sometimes I can get away with cuddling him back to sleep, and sometimes DP can rock him. But the majority of times he wants feeding.

Thank you! I never sleep trained with DS1 but I was pretty miserable until he started sleeping well so I’m much more open to it this time. The way I see it is that DS2 is crying 10 times a night anyway each time he wakes, so if I sleep train him then he’ll actually be crying less overall, but I’m not sure if that’s just my sleep deprived logic or if I’d actually be able to let him cry. (And I don’t believe it’s possible without crying but we do try to settle him without feeding and he always cries).

........."but the majority of the time he wants feeding"

I think he's hungry. Try him on some pureed fruit or veg (no salt in the cooking of veg) or rusks. Your MIL has been through it all before (as have I). It's surely worth a try, isn't it?

Thank you and sorry to hear you are suffering too, it’s really tough isn’t it! It doesn’t really help is my partner takes the baby downstairs as he is busy playing with our eldest and getting him ready for the day etc. and we have nowhere for the baby to sleep downstairs. I do know it will pass as it did with my eldest… but I was miserable for a good eight months waiting for it to happen and he wasn’t even this bad! I live in hope of a four hour stretch like you say, even two hours I’d take at the moment. Really hope it gets better for you soon!

If you are open to it I would try a bottle of expressed milk or formula in the evenings before bedtime. It makes a huge difference for my 4mo, if she has it she will sleep through to 3-4am, if not she will wake up every hour and do "mini-feeds" throughout the night as she is half asleep.

You have my sympathy I had this this DS1 and actually I was dangerous in the end!
We did gentle sleep training (was still EBF) with my husband doing the stay and support method and we gave a safe comforter which I wore down my top for a day and husband also slept with one night before handing to him.

We also did the sign for milk every feed til he started signing it. My DH had to go in every wake at first to susshhh pat, stroke and comfort without picking him up ideally. I would still feed either every 3 hours or once he started signing when he signed milk. I still fed after bath but would keep him awake if possible then he would go into his cot awake ish. Within 3 days he was linking his cycles to 3 hours on his own!

It is possible to gentle sleep train without it being CIO method. My only regret was not starting it around 4 months as he had been this way since birth and honestly most nights I clocked less then 2 hours in a 10 hour sleep window!

I do actually think he’s hungry. My eldest used to feed to sleep but when he woke it was a few sucks for comfort and he’d be back off. Whereas this one seems to be having proper feeds at night. She’s been telling me to give him solids since four months which I don’t agree with, but at 5.5 months I think it might be worth a try. I basically keep wondering whether to sleep train then introduce solids, or introduce solids then sleep train if it still doesn’t work.

Unfortunately we have tried this and it doesn’t work, I think mainly because the most we can get him to take is 3oz. He has a bottle once a week while I’m out and it makes no different, we’ve tried to make it nightly so it forms more of a routine in the last week (and to try to break the bedtime feed to sleep association a bit) and still no luck.

Try Sarah Carpenter Sleep: she’s a genius sleep consultant, who’s very gentle and hands-on (remotely, via a camera and WhatsApp), with you in the room. No leaving babies to cry. She took us from 25 wakes a night 😱 to sleeping through, a routine, and cot naps. It’s not plain sailing as we’re currently in a regression due to molars and a cold, but I find that quite reassuring: DS still cries out for us when he needs something, like Nurofen or the snot sucker. But he doesn’t cry out for help to connect sleep cycles. If all is well – no teething, no illness, the routine is on point – bedtime takes about 15 minutes and he sleeps for 11.5 hours a night, plus 2 naps totalling 2.5 hours. And Sarah solved his constipation issue. Plus, night weaned without tears! Because he just slept and slept for many nights in a row, clearly not needing the milk: no “send DH in with water and screaming”. She’s Mary Poppins.

The problem is if DP tries to settle him at bedtime he just gets more and more worked up until he’s screaming hysterically and obviously then I feed him. Last week he tried to do bedtime and DS ended up screaming so hysterically it took me 45 mins to calm him down, it was awful. So I don’t really think we can sleep train without any crying, I know it’s not the same as CIO as someone would be with him but he’d still essentially be crying until he passed out,

Ooh thank you that’s really useful, I’ll look her up! 25 wakes… you poor thing, so glad she was able to help

This will be an unpopular opinion but my second baby was like this, she only started sleeping better when I stopped breastfeeding and started pumping so she was taking more milk at a time, it seemed to help her settle into a deeper sleep. Not every baby will be like this obviously but just offering our experience.