Help! 6mo still waking hourly

[solitudehiker]

I am sooo tired 😩

DD2 is 6 months now and still waking literally every single hour overnight. Like clockwork. Feed back down then up again an hour later. DH is “shattered from work” and somehow sleeps through the crying 🙄 so it’s just me doing every wake up.

I thought by now we’d be getting some longer stretches. She naps ok in the day if I feed to sleep but at night it’s just relentless. I’m like a zombie on the school run and the big kids have basically lived on fish fingers this week.

Is this normal at this age? Or should I be trying some kind of sleep training? I don’t know if I can do controlled crying I just end up sobbing with her but I can’t keep going like this I’m so done in.

Please tell me it gets better soon before I lose my mind 😂

Has she always done this or is it just this week? Does she have a dummy?

Oh this sounds tough. Sleep deprivation is so hard, you have my sympathies.

Are you exclusively bf? How's weaning going? I'm sure no one will be able to give you a magic answer here, but you might get some ideas.

Thanks both 😴 she’s pretty much always been like this tbh maybe slightly worse this week but we’ve never had more than a 3 hour stretch ever!

Yep EBF no dummy she just spits it out and screams 😩 we’ve literally just started trying a bit of baby rice and purée but not properly doing meals yet maybe that will help?

I just feel like everyone else’s babies are sleeping longer by now and I’m just permanently wired on coffee 😂

My theory on EBF at this point is that you can’t tell how much milk they’ve had, so they might be waking up hungry.

AND - the breast is the comfort to get them back to sleep. Double whammy - really hard.

So I would try to transition to bottle for the pre bed feed and another at eg midnight so you can really fill them up with milk. Either express or formula.

Then they may sleep longer.

I think I also would pat mine to sleep, while on the breast, and eventually I could do it not on the breast and they knew it was sleep time.

Great thing about both of these - your DH has no excuse not to help either…!

First thing is first - your DH needs to be covering some of these nights - can you get baby to take some formula so that he can? Now they’re 6 months old it’s not going to do any harm.

Then when you’ve got a couple of good nights sleep in you, you can try to tackle the issue.

Sleep training will be much easier to do if you’ve got some sleep in the bank and are less emotional through exhaustion. Your DH owes it to his older child to allow you this sleep because they need you too.

Could you afford to get a sleep training consultant at all? Or a night nanny for some nights? You might need a bit of expert help here!

Both ours did this at 5/6 months, one with dummy and the other BF. The human brain is not meant to wake so often, I was basically not functioning and something had to give. The really important turning point for me was realising that hourly waking was doing my babies no good. They really need longer stretches of sleep too. I think they were noticeably happier once we had sorted it.

We decided they could manage 3 hour stretches. DH signed up for basically a couple of sleepless nights. I'd feed to sleep, then "if" they woke before the 3h (of course they did!) they just got dad not me. He soothed them, sang to them etc in the dark until the 3h were up. Then I took over, fed them back to sleep. As soon as they woke DH stepped in. We bed hopped between our room and spare room so the baby only saw me after the 3 hours.

I swear they barely cried. It was hard hard work but honestly very gentle and loving. Night 1 DH didn't get much sleep, night 2 was substantially better, night 3 it was just me getting up with them 3 hourly. We stuck with that for a couple of weeks then moved them out to 4 hours - again it only took a nigh for two. Maybe we got lucky but honestly, I don't think they were distressed by it and they genuinely benefitted from being able to sleep longer stretches.

What’s her schedule like? Could she have too early a bedtime or too much daytime sleep? Such frequent wakings are often because they don’t have enough sleep pressure to get them through the night.

Solidarity though. My six month old has been a nightmare from three months, we thought we’d got it down to two/three nighttime wakes for a week, but it’s all gone to shit again 😫 Any kind of unresponsive sleep training isn’t for us so I’m just hoping that this is his upper teeth coming through and he’ll go back to slightly better sleep soon..

My EBF baby was like this until I started giving him a bottle before bed. Now he sleeps through AND takes a dummy !!

Wow thanks everyone this is actually really helpful 🙏

We don’t really have a proper “schedule” if I’m honest I just feed her to sleep when she seems tired in the day which is usually about 3 naps but they can be anywhere from 30 mins to 2 hours depending what chaos is going on with the big kids 🤷‍♀️ bedtime is about 7.30 but again sometimes later if DS3 is being feral 😂

I think you’re right about DH needing to take some of the load he literally sleeps through everything and I’m sat there crying into the muslins 😩 might try a bottle at bedtime tonight and see if she’ll actually take one maybe then he can do the next wake up

The idea of 3 hour stretches sounds like bliss right now even just that would feel amazing 🥲