Sleep is not needed for my 4 month old!

[lavitaebellaaa]

Help! First time mum here. My LO ( 3 months and 20 days) used to sleep in chunks of 4-5 hrs a night. For the last two weeks this went out the window and he's been barely sleeping 2 hours in a row. The last three days has been the worst where he will sleep 1 hour, feed 5 mins and then sleep again for an hour. This pattern would go on all night. I'm running on fumes.
In the day I've noticed he's started drooling a lot and has been sucking on his toys and Muslin aggressively. This has meant his poo has gone bright yellow, runny and diarrhoea. His naps also are very short in the daytime, Max 30 mins unless he's clinging on to me. He wakes up crying/ screaming most times.
Can it be sleep regression? Or early teething? I've tried Calpol, bongela, cool teething toys, putting him (safely) to sleep/feed next to me in bed at night. Nothing works, just lots of cuddles. Thanks! Very tired zombie mum.

Sounds very normal to me unfortunately! 4 month sleep regression was a killer! I have no advice, my baby was an absolutely terrible sleeper until I stopped breast feeding her!

Sorry should have said he's exclusively breastfed on demand! Thanks x

@lavitaebellaaa Feels like I could I have written this post word for word. Going through the exact same thing at the moment and am on my knees. I have other kids too and never remember it being this bad. Any advice from posters would be appreciated x

I had one of those.

That was after dd1 who slept 12 hours every night from 8 weeks, so I can assure you there is nothing you're doing wrong. (both ebf)

Dd2 thought sleep was for wimps. It's no comfort now, but she's 16yo and I usually have to shout at her three times to get her up for school.

I tried everything from keeping a food diary, quiet soothing baths, nice routine. Nope. She wasn't having any of it.
Eventually at about 18 months she was still waking about every 2-3 hours and started getting up for the day at around 3am. I saw a very nice doctor who prescribed her Medised (no longer registered for children) otherwise known as magic sleepy medicine. Half a teaspoon and she slept 12 hours. 2 nights of that and she slept fine (about 8 hours overnight) without it, so I think it was at least partially habit.
That obviously isn't much help to you!

What I do think effected her sleep as oppose to her sisters was that she woke up and screamed immediately. I called it 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. So, especially since she had a big sister I didn't want waking, I rushed through the second I heard her disturb. That meant that she didn't learn to self settle. Whereas dd1 would wake, chat to herself, wriggle around and decide whether it was worth the effort of a yell, and I'd only go through when the yells were continuous, so she self settled probably 50-75% of the time even when tiny.

You might find sending dad (no promise of milk there) over to rub their back and see if they'll self settle helpful. Didn't work for dd2, but that did work for ds.
Make sure they're warm enough too. First time ds slept through was when we were at a friend's house, who kept the house warmer than ours. We upped the heating by a tiny amount and then he slept at ours too. May have been a fluke.

Good luck.

Thank you!

@Witchend thank you! I’m going to try to keep a routine in the evenings to see if it helps. Interesting point on temperature. We are the opposite, live in Singapore and it’s about 27 degrees in the room at night. Maybe he’s too hot! Thanks again x

I'm with you here! I'm on week 5 of it but ds doesn't feed for 5 minutes he feeds for half an hour! So I'm up half an hour for every hour I get to sleep!
Naps are such an effort too. We have to force them so he doesn't get overtired and he's such an effort to get to sleep and then difficult fo our down which I wouldn't mind but the only way I can get him to sleep is by bouncing on a yoga ball in a dark room with white noise!
Ocassionally I'm lucky and get a 2 hour stint and have even hand a handful of 3 hours in the past 5 weeks! I live for the weekends when my partner can get up with him and I can have an extra couple of hours in bed!
Fingers crossed it doesn't last too long for all of us!

27 in the room at night is very hot.

What is he wearing ?