BF baby 16w old - can I get her to sleep through the night?

[nicetomeetyou]

I have a 16w old lovely baby and an 18 mo and things have been going really well. I am coping on broken sleep but would really like baby to sleep through and even though I feed her at 10.30pm or 11pm she is still waking at 2.am or more often somewhere between 3-4.30am. She has put on weight really well and is now well over 6.5kg (weight 3 weeks ago).

I am interested to know other's experience - is it habit she is waking? I find that she is wide awake and keen to feed but within 5mins she is fast asleep and I can put her down - trouble is it takes me an hour maybe to get back to sleep.

She is going down at 8pm no trouble.

IME it is not habit at this age it is hunger

she is doing really well - my DS was still having 2 - 3 night feeds at this age

my bottlefed lo's never slept through at that age either. DD slept through at 5 1/2 months (started solids at 16 weeks as per guidance then) and ds slept through at 8 months (started solids at 5 1/2 months).

They can drink a lot of milk in five minutes. probably just hunger imo.

I think it is fair to say that you can't make her sleep through the night (sounds like she is doing really well BTW), but you can certainly encourage her. I bf all 3 of my DCs and they slept through (7pm to 7am ish) at 8, 10 and 12 weeks respectively. I am well aware that this is fairly unusual and that there was a lot of luck on my side, but I do think I did a couple of things that helped. Firstly, once they were over about 6 weeks I always left them for a few minutes before I went to them when they woke - sometimes they went back to sleep, if they didn't go back to sleep I always tried to resettle them before feeding (dummy / cuddle / rock / pat etc), again, just 5 mins and if no luck then I would feed. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Certainly it was more of an effort to do this than just to feed immediately, but I felt that the pay off in encouraging longer sleep sooner was worth it.

With DS (now 5 months), he sept through 7pm to approx 6.30am once when he was about 10 weeks old. He then regressed to waking at 5am for a couple of nights but not feeding (just quickly resettled), then had a complete regression to waking around 11pm, 2am and 5am. I suddenly realised what a different person I had been with my two DDs and DH during those few days of good sleep (not snappy / angry / depressed) and decided that for the sake of our family I had to sort him out and get life back on an even keel. He had a great weight gain (from 25th centile to 75th) and had demonstrated he could sleep through so I went for a rather draconian approach. I reintroduced a 10.30pm feed and then made the arbitrary decision that I would not feed him again until 6.30am. For 2 nights he woke and cried at around 4am and I stayed up with him cuddling and rocking and soothing him but NOT feeding until he dropped off on my chest through sheer exhaustion (took over an hour). The third night he woke but was resettled quickly and easily and within a week he slept through 10.30 to 6.30. I then dropped the 10.30pm feed and he slept through from 7pm to 6.30am which soon became 7am. I am aware this approach is not something everyone would want to take, but it was good for me and my family and, after the first couple of nights, good for DS too as ever since then he has slept brilliantly.