Awake for 5 hours and want regular feeds!!! HELP

[MadeleineMiles]

My baby (3 weeks and 5 days) stays awake for 4-5 hours during the evening!!! She does cry a little bit, and she wants to feed every half hour although when I do put her to the breast she only feeds for a few minutes and then gets restless again. During this time she is a bit restless and wriggles around.

Any advice?

yes it is perfectly normal for babies to cluster feed in the evening...do you co sleep.. you can rest while you feed and she can go on and off the breast without you having to move too much !

Sounds fairly normal to me. Many babies are unsettled in the evenings - some are colicky, some are just hungry, do you think your milk supply might be a bit lower in the evening?

Perhaps she is overstimulated/overtired?

Is she just hot/uncomfortable?

Lots of them do this as electriclulu has said. Part of the "problem" ime is that many of us (pre children) think that all children and babies go to sleep at a child's bedtime! . (that's what happens on the tv anyway). In reality the vast majority of babies are quite wakeful in the evenings. Lots of them (but not all) will go to bed eventually around 11-12.

Once b/feeding is well established you may (or may not) want to consider a dummy. It worked for us with dd2 but not dd1. Obviously it is a personal choice whether to try it or not.

At 3 weeks she is trying to build up your milk supply with this constant evening feeding. My DS was just the same and he was bottle fed EBM It is a pain but it doesn't go on forever. It will eventually help her to tank up on milk in the evening so she can sleep for longer stretches at night. I very much doubt it is anything to do with low milk supply - just keep feeding and rest whilst she does it if you can.