3 month old wakening every hour to sleep feed

[jrwxx]

I have a 3 and a half month old daughter, she's yet to sleep a straight a 2/3 hours at night never mind right through the night!

Around 9 weeks I started a bedtime routine, bath, bottle, bed. She had her bath between 8pm-8:45pm and is upstairs getting her bottle for around 9pm. She usually falls asleep 10pmish. The problem is she starts to move around and fuss every hour looking for a feed. She doesn't fully wake up, I pick her up before she actually opens her eyes/starts crying, she takes a couple mls of a bottle then falls back asleep. So essentially she is 'dream feeding' every hour throughout the night.

She isn't hungry it's purely a comfort, she refuses dummies, will cry when I attempt to give her one, only wants the bottle.

So how can I break this? She is really sleepy and sometimes doesn't open her eyes between 10pm -5:30am bit is still fussing and wakening up wanting fed every hour.

If I don't give her the bottle she will just cry so I'm really stuck

They have a growth spurt at 3mo. It is probably a passing phase

She has never slept through the night since birth, she's always been up and down all night. If this is a phase she was born into it!

I just want to say that I'm going through the EXACT same thing with a 15 week old right now. So much solidarity! It's exhausting.

We had 2/3 weeks of good sleep at 10ish weeks and it's now back to being worse than when she was a newborn which I thought wouldn't be possible!

She's just stopped doing a long stretch at the start of the night which used to be 2-4hrs long but I put her to bed between 7-8 each night and she "sleeps" (as in will continue to go back to night sleep with comforting) until 6-7am. So maybe you could try bringing her bedtime forward a little to see if you can have a couple of free evening hours, particularly if you are in a situation where you can share who stays in the room with her during that time.

Not ideal but anything for some respite!

Babies can't even begin to self settle until around six months, so I would expect multiple wake ups until then of varying degrees until around then.

Don't do what we did though and miss the six month window to make positive sleep associations to allow independent settling. Our baby is not a baby anymore and yet on a bad night we'll have multiple awakenings, and he still hasn't slept through. We're having to wean him off assisted sleep associations and it's hard work.

We're working through a book called, "It's never too late to sleep train, which is a no nonsense guide to breaking bad habits and I wish I'd had it before that key six months.

Happy to go through a few of the pointers it raises in pm if you are interested!