10mo cluster feeding in the middle of the night

[ellesabe]

A bit of background...dd is ebf and slept brilliantly at first. We always woke her at 10:30pm for a feed and from 7weeks she would sleep through until 7am.
When she was 6mo she caught loads of colds which disrupted her sleep for a couple of months but she got back on track. We dropped the 10:30 feed when she was 8mo and a few times she slept through 7-7.

Over the past couple of months her sleep has been getting progressively worse. She has been waking 2 or 3 times a night for feeds and would usually go straight back to sleep afterwards.

However this week she has been a nightmare. Last night she woke at 10:30 for a feed and then again at 2am. When I put her down after the second feed, she lay in her cot for 20 minutes before I needed to feed her again, another full feed! And then again 30 minutes later. She eventually went back to sleep at 4am and then woke at 6:20. This is the third time she's done this in the past week.

I am exhausted and my nipples are really sore! I don't really know what is causing this is she eats a lot at mealtimes and has good naps during the day (about 2.5hours in total). I think she may be comfort sucking but she has never done this before, even as a newborn, and I'm not really sure how do deal with it.

I don't really want to do controlled crying as she always goes straight to sleep at 7pm with a dummy and couldn't bear listening to her cry in the middle of the night.

I wondered about trying a bottle of formula each evening at 11pm to see if that will satisfy her for longer but I just wondered if anyone else had any wisdom to offer.

Please help me get my good sleeper back before we all go insane!

Poor you, lack of sleep is a bugger :( You say that she's eating a lot of solids, how much would you say she's getting? How often does she BF during the day? Have there just been any changes, have you gone back to work or anything like that?

Nothing has really changed during the day except that dd is more distracted than she once was. We bf when she wakes up, sometimes mid-morning, mid-afternoon and at bedtime. For breakfast she has a large bowl of baby cereal plus half a slice of toast or half a piece of fruit. An average sized lunch/dinner would involve maybe 20 pasta spirals with 5 cubes sauce plus fruit/yoghurt and 2 rice cakes.

The only thing I can think of is that it might be her top teeth coming, but she doesn't seem in any discomfort.

Oh and I randomly had mastitis last week. No idea where that came from as we hadn't done anything differently with feeding, but I suppose it might be linked.

Are you doing BLW? That sounds like quite a lot of solid food for a 10 mo. Here is some info on solids and BF babies that you might find useful.

Distractibility is pretty normal in babies of this age, the only thing you can do I think is to try and remove distractions but that's easier said than done!

Oh. Now I'm worried that I've been giving her too much solids and that my milk supply may have dwindled :(
I have tried increasing the number of breastfeeds during the day but it always results in her having lots of tiny feeds and never getting to the hind milk.

Why is this so flipping hard??

Don't worry about foremilk and hindmilk, it's not as clear cut as there being two different kinds of milk. There's a good explanation of it here. There are some tips on that link about BF along side solid foods, you could try nursing an hour before you offer any solids.

Have you read anything about baby led weaning?

I forgot to ask, is she having anything else to drink other than breastmilk?

Yeah she has water with meals from a freeflow Tommee Tippee cup but she's not particularly good at it. She usually manages 1oz per meal.