Overtired 6 week old? Help!

[MamaPingu]

My 6 week old little boy is having trouble with sleep and it's wearing me down.
The first two weeks he was perfect, 3-4 hour consistent sleeps.
He then had a spell of 1-2 hours and lots of crying which got diagnosed as silent reflux (after a battle with the doctors!).
He now sleeps fairly well in the evening and the night but now from around 7am-1pm he is becoming a bit of a nightmare. He cries but not in agony like he used to and doesn't sleep for long periods at all. I think he might be over tired but I don't know what to do!
What should his sleep patterns be like during the day?
I'm worried it's his reflux waking him up but it isn't the same sort of cry he used to do. He's driving me a.bit mad cause I'm tired and I just want him to be content again

Any help would be really appreciated!

Hey,

I'm not sure if this will really help as i don't have any actual advice but i can tell you that i was in a similar boat with my DD. She had colic for first 16 weeks which affected her in the evening but once we got past 11pm she would sleep fairly well. During the day however, from about 6 weeks old actually, she would not sleep for more than 30 mins at a time. Was clearly still tired, but nothing would work, tried taking her out in her pram, walking with her, taking her in the car, putting her in her swing, nothing.

I just kept a mental note of when she did sleep and tried to get her to sleep at the same time the following day and just took the view that at least she slept fairly well in the evening, it is awful though and i had many a day wondering if it would ever end, it seemed like torture for both of us. I also felt it made it a daunting thought to go out with her as she would often be very tired and upset but refuse to sleep.

She did outgrow it but it is exhausting and upsetting as you know what your DC needs but they wont give in. Sorry i dont actually have any constructive advice as we didn't find a magic solution, what i will say though is try not to get too wrapped up in books, etc. which advise how often and how long babies should sleep for. They are all different, as long as you are giving your DC ample opportunity to get some rest i dont think there is much more you can do.

We sometimes struggled to get DS to nap on a morning, even when he was clearly overtired...we found swaddling helped, then spent quite a lot of time pacing the room rocking and 'shushing' him until he dropped off, then could put him down. We used a dummy too. In fact, we basically did the 5 'S's as described here. Worth a try, if its not stuff you're doing already of course . DS is 9 weeks now and has settled a lot, so hopefully it will improve for you soon!

Are you putting to sleep early enough? A baby of that age should be going back to sleep no more than 1 hour after waking. Once I cracked getting the right amount of time between naps ds improved a lot. White noise (not gentle noise - really full on fuzzy loud noise) also really helped - it needs to be much louder than you think.