advice for achieving longer stretches of sleep

[kcj748]

My DS is not too bad in the night and I am of course not expecting him to be sleeping through the night or anything like that yet. He wakes every four hours to eat in the night. I don't really mind this but I would like to start aiming for longer. He has in the past slept 6, 7 and even 8 hour stretches so I know he is capable of it and so I am fairly confident he's getting enough to eat. Does anyone have any tips for stretching his sleeps a bit? Thanks so much.

How old is he?

10 weeks

He is still pretty young. Remember every baby is different... you have to work out what is good for him.

DD (18weeks) has slept through from 7 weeks (with the exception of a few nights here/there teething and with a horrid cold :-(). If she does not have enough sleep (around 4-6hrs) during the day she does not sleep through the night so it is worth looking at his napping routine. If she falls asleep at 6pm she is up by 5am... however if she falls asleep at 7pm we can easily get to 9am (she's still in bed!) so it can be worth bathing a sleepy baby later to keep them awake then establish a clear bedtime routine.

Our is... Full feed at 6pm then bath around 6.30pm to waken her a little followed by a chat (well, babble), get pj's on and then a top up feed. She swaddled in a cellular blanket and put into her crib with a top blanket tucked tightly under the matress (still like that in the morning tight!). she is put in her crib awake with a kiss and told 'goodnight' then the lights go out and she is asleep withing 5min.

DH and I don't seem to disturb her if watching a dvd in bed etc so long as she has settled for an hr and in a deep sleep.

Does he re-settle after he wakes or does he come in with you?

At 10 weeks I would just feed him, 4 hours is very good at this age. And more is brilliant. I know it's very tough tough, you just need to do anything to get through it. Maybe he is having a growth spurt and needs more milk and hopefully this will pass soon. Is he BF or FF?

DS is 11 months and still not sleeping through, but he recently started with a CM so is after a bit of comfort in the middle of the night! In my (limited) experience, their sleep is like a yo-yo anyway when they'e so young, we thought we had a breakthrough with DS' s sleep and then the 9 months regression hit!

Not very helpful, sorry, but I'm not sure what you could do when he's so young.

Read this

I started their night time stretching ideas at 6 weeks and DS was sleeping through by 10

Oh yes I have read that. Does it work? I'm a little nervous about disrupting his routine by waking him to do the dream feed. Also is that stretching the base time by 15 minutes things difficult? I imagine it would be?

Yes it worked for me and DS. He was on the big side which I think helped.

I didn't need to wake him for the dream feed, just put him to the breast and he latched on and fed in his sleep! Then no need to wind as he fed so calmly he didn't take any air. I just put him back down. It was lovely, I remember it fondly.

Stretching feels awful at the time as you just want to get back to bed, and it can involve crying depending on whether you use a dummy or whatever but it's so worth it. In just 2-3 nights you will find he's stretched already. it's really short term pain for long term gain. I did it for a few nights so the baseline was moved, then stuck at that new baseline for a while til I was strong enough to move it again