Help! new feeding and bedtime battles with my 3 month old!

[mrswee]

We have until very recently had a reasonable bedtime and night feeding/sleeping routine seemingly established with our 3 month/ 14 week old.
It's been working since about 8 weeks old, though then she went to bed at around 8.30/9 but we managed to slowly and happily move it back night by night until bedtime is at 7pm.
Then in the last 10 days or so, she has become very fretful and not really able to settle herself to sleep anymore, crying and crying and getting more and more upset when I go in to shushh and try and settle her rather than responding well to my shushing like she did previously.
We mix feed and mainly use bottles at night as she settles faster (she used to breastfeed in the night for up to 3 hours at a time!), the night time bottle feeding was working well until recently too.
Now she has started screaming the house down as soon as her bottles are finished too. We have tried upping the amount of formula but it makes no difference how much milk we give her, she still screams and the only way I find to settle her is to let her breastfeed for a short while after a bottle, which kind of defeats the purpose!

We give her a bath around 6.15 which is always happy.
When getting her ready for bed after the bath at about 6.30, she has started to get fretful just as we start to dress her.
She screams until we can quickly finish dressing her and the bottle is in her mouth, then screams again when the bottle is done.
Then she is so unsettled that she won't settle herself to sleep in her cot.

When she wakes for her night feeds she is desperate to feed and is again upset when her bottles are finished and is again hard to settle.

She used to do all these parts of the routine with out too much fuss, just a little crying at bed time in the cot for less than 5 mins most nights and would be shushed back to sleep if needed.

The doctor gave us infant gaviscon today incase the crying after the bottle is related to acid reflux.

We have also started to try and establish day time naps recently, which has been pretty fretful and I am wondering if I have caused bad associations with being put down to sleep

can anyone help? we need tips on settling and avoiding this battle that starts with the pyjamas!!

DD is now 6 months, an did exactly the same thing (crying as soon as she finished feeds/was being burped), lasted for about a month, no idea what it was - we just assumed she was rather annoyed at having her meal taken away!

Does she have a dummy at all? She's still only very young, and some babies are really comforted by sucking - you know this from giving her a comfort feed when she is upset.

All I can say is go with the flow, let her guide you, and try not to concentrate too much on routine at this young age. You'll probably find that she'll naturally slip into one that works for her when she is ready. And definitely think about giving the dummy a try if you haven't already, for your sanity if nothing else Good luck

Thanks for your reply.

We persevere with a dummy but she rarely takes one, if she is sleepy enough after a bottle then she will sometimes take the dummy but as soon as she is aware it's not a bottle, she will spit or even grab it out of her mouth.
She took the dummy last night when she was still sleepy and had just finished a night feed, but spat it out in a temper today after a feed.
We persevere by offering a dummy because we are still hoping she might get some comfort from a dummy at some point - as you say she seems to be comforted by sucking and a dummy seems the obvious thing!
It does seem like she is angry at having her meal taken away.

sorry also meant to say that she did lead us into this 'routine' herself rather than us implementing it on to her.
The only thing we did was slowly move the time back as she got more active during the day and therefore more tired during early evening, that again was lead by her being too tired to handle having a bath so late and so on.
You are right, she is very young and I know her needs change all the time, I just feel a bit lost now in knowing what she wants and needs!