4 month sleep regression. How long?

[skandi1]

DS is almost 19 weeks and for the past 2.5 weeks has been awake lots during the night.

He sleeps in our room in his crib. Since he was 3 weeks old he has slept 7pm till 4am (ebf demand fed so his choice) and his 4am feed would be a short 10mins. He was a big baby 9lbs 8 so has been able to take monster feeds.

However at bang on 16 weeks he started waking up 5 or 6 times a night and between 2am and 5am he will stay awake, laughing, shouting, wanting to play. Argh.

I know it's a phase because dd did this too. I think she did this for around 4 week in total.

So what I wanted to know is, is this likely to be over in about ten days time or has anyone had the 4 month nonsense go on for longer and if so how long

Tia

It usually stops (or calms down at least) once they hit the developmental leap at about 19 weeks from their EDD.

It can go on for 1-6 weeks (ish) depending on the child.

In some cases, the 'habitual' waking can continue after the developmental leap. However, I've got 'tricky' sleeper who always did what you describe during developmental leaps (& his frequent wakings often continued afterwards), but the long period awake in the night always disappeared on its own once he hit the leap.

I always found that during those Wide Awake sessions in the night, he would often go back off after 1.5 hours if I fed / rocked / whatever at that point. If I missed the 1.5 hours point he'd be up for 3 hours. There's some biological basis to this with 'awake cycles' being 1.5 hours long.

All of that presupposes vaguely decent naps - if he's not having enough naps and is overtired, that can lead to the same sort of nighttime behaviour. If he's having a sleep after being awake for 1.5-2.5 hours in the day, overtiredness is unlikely to be the problem IMO.

HTH