Ebf 13 week old

[Picklepepperpiper]

I am ebf my 13 week old ds. He takes ages to settle at bedtime, I take him up at 6 and he not usually asleep til 8. He will then sleep through til 11.30 and then is up every 2 hours. His sleep is getting worse as he gets older.

I have considered giving him a formula top up at bedtime to see if this will get him to sleep faster and for a bit longer without waking up every 2 hours. I do not want him to sleep all night, just to be able to do longer stretches.

Has anyone got any advice please as would like to avoid formula if possible as I think I would feel like I had failed at bf. This is my last baby and I was unable to bf dd.

Thanks

How often is he feeding in the day time?

Yes, cram as much as poss in during the day- DD2 (11 weeks, ebf) has 5-6 feeds in between 7am and 7pm now and has been sleeping through for the past two weeks. She does sometimes have more, for example has been feeding every 1.5-2 hours but I think that she's going through a growth spurt (at least I bloody hope so) and it will settle down again.
Do you wake him at 11.30? The only reason I ask is that we were waking DD up until 9 weeks when she was taking less and less at that feed, and eventually refused to feed then so I stopped waking her up! She woke at 5 am a couple of times and we gradually stretched it out to 7 am.
If you aren't waking him then, what about trying waking him at 10.30-11pm, i.e. pre-empting that wake up, and maybe allowing his longest stretch to be when you go to bed then?
Agree about perhaps making bedtime a bit later/ prolonging bedtime with baths etc too, as he isn't sleeping at 6 anyway.

Thanks for all the positive posts. He feeds a lot during the day, but have never really counted up how many feeds. It is usually every 1 and half to 2 hours.

He is a terrible sleeper during the day and has only had 1 hour in total today. I find that by about 6ish he is overtired and the best way to calm is to give him a bath and then lay in the dark in bed feeding him until he is asleep. Tonight I have topped him up with a bit of expressed breast milk and he was asleep by 7.30.

I don't immediately feed him when he wakes and sometimes he will go back to sleep with the aid of white noise.

I know it sounds counterintuitive but if you can get him to sleep more in the day it might actually help at night? Maybe he's overtired?
DD2 only really sleeps for 20 mins at a time in the day but she does do it 3 or four times.

Sorry, just seen that you have said he is overtired.
Perhaps white noise in the day is the answer then, just to try and break the overtired cycle.
You do sound like you're doing everything right- I would second the opinion of other posters who have said that adding a formula feed at night may not make any difference.

He is a nightmare to get to sleep during the day - we have to take him for long walks which is ok during the week when dd is at school, but almost impossible at the weekends.

I am trying to get him to nap at home is his pram, but doesn't always work.

We did have a better night last night as I gave him 3oz of expressed breast milk as a top up and he only woke twice. I think I will wake him tonight when I go to bed and breastfed and then top up with expressed milk.

Ay tips on how to get him to nap at home during the day greatly appreciated.

That's great, thankyou. I usually try to get him to go to sleep after 1 and a half hours just doesn't always work.

I have just managed to get him down by reenacting bedtime, lying down feeding until he was asleep and then playing white noise. Sling sounds like a good idea, will give that a try too.