Please help- baby daytime sleep

[Goldi321]

Please help, I’m desperate here. Baby is 9 weeks old and will not sleep any longer than 15 minutes on a surface that isn’t me. I can see her getting over tired and by the evening she is inconsolable when she hasn’t slept. I’ve had a few rare occasions (in the car) where she has slept for >1hr but these are unicorn sleeps. She won’t sleep in the pram and I live rurally with roads I can’t walk a pram on so even if I could get her to sleep in it I would have to get her into and out of the car and that wakes her up.
she will sleep in the sling but I am still recovering from the birth and get back pain and a dragging pain down below after too long, I also can’t do anything around the house with her in the sling.
Im feeling SO isolated and lonely with the baby. DH is out of the house 8-7 and he is really struggling with the change to parenthood. If I could just get her down to sleep for a couple of decent hands free naps I would be able to keep on top of things and would feel so much better.
Have tried:

• rocking her until she is asleep, attempting to get her through the first sleep cycle and then putting her down


• wrapping her in my dressing gown (supervised) to smell of me


• swaddling, putting on my shoulder and patting as per the baby whisperer method (she hates it, is such a nosy baby she kicks off at not being able to see anything)


• making a makeshift nest (don’t want to spend so much money if it won’t work)


• pram and RockIt

none work! Help!

Oh my HV was useless. Told me she won’t sleep as she can smell the milk on me, but also told me I need to get her into a routine, but not to let her cry for longer than a minute

Oh it's so tough in those early days! It will start to get better. Some to try if you haven't already:

• if you breastfeed, lie on your side in bed and feed. You can then roll away when asleep.
• use a bouncy chair and bounce with your foot. You can resume bouncing when she is about to wake.

What is she like awake? I used to aim to do jobs whilst DC were awake e.g. lying in bouncer/playmat and I would chat to them. Naps were my time to chill! I appreciate 15 mins is not giving you a proper break, but could you work on ways to do more whilst she is awake so you feel more on top of it?

Thank you @BendingSpoons. She has periods when awake of being delightful and lying cooing at her black and white books. I just always feel guilty at leaving her to this for so long as I feel like a negligent mum. Other times she is inconsolable when put down and just wants to be held.

Ive battled all this morning to get her to sleep. The house is a mess. I had to rock her for ages and all I got was 2 x 10 minutes periods where I had to keep my hand on her chest to keep her asleep.
When I try to put her down early in the evening I get the same, a battle that I lose but I also end up losing any adult time with DH and sitting on my own in a dark room. It feels not worth it and like I might as well just have her downstairs with me until we go to bed, but everyone says I should be getting her into a routine by now.

She’s only tiny, try not to stress. They find their own routines in my experience, I never tried a routine and it just happened by itself. Also I know it feels so hard not being able to put them down but just embrace the cuddles on the sofa and watch some good tv that’s what I ended up doing. It honestly doesn’t last long at all. SIDS advice is to keep them downstairs with you until 6 months anyway. I cuddled mine on the sofa until I went up for bed. Also the housework is never ending anyway so even when you do get it done it needs doing again very quickly so try not to worry about it so much.

Is she crying loads in the evening, every evening? Both mine did this and it's called the witching hours. Every evening between 7 and 9pm they cried. I basically either bounced them or fed them through it.

What helped was knowing it was developmental and normal and eating before it started. Then I'd just sit and watch telly with just a lamp on.

As for the rest of the naps. 9 weeks is still very young. At this age with both mine we'd have the afternoon nap as a cuddle while I watched TV. I'd do a few jobs while they were safety occupied with their play mat as well.

Morning naps were usually in the pram. Perhaps drive somewhere you can walk and have a coffee / chat. Perhaps see if any local walk and talks are happening

She will let you know when she is unhappy, so if she is happily lying there, then make the most of it! Babies get stimulated by everything, so she is still learning by looking at her book. You can keep talking to her at the same time if you want e.g. I'm just hanging up this washing. I would often do 'pottering' jobs e.g. tidying up, so I can keep coming past.

I really wouldn't worry about a fixed bedtime routine now. I was told for the first 3 months don't worry at all, next 3 months consider starting some bits e.g. a bedtime story, then more of a routine from 6m. I also think 'routine' is misleading. Your routine can be e.g. we put her in a fresh sleepsuit at 9pm and she eventually falls asleep on us.

I would just go with the flow for now and have her downstairs on one of you or on a playmat etc as suits. Eat dinner, watch TV, carry on fairly normally. At that age mine were cluster feeding all evening and falling to sleep around 10pm. It gradually got earlier (to 7.30 ish) without us really trying. Trying to force an earlier bed time is stressful and not needed.

My DS is 3mos and he is doing the same.
When he was born, he actually had longer stretches of sleep (5hrs!!). Then at around 3 weeks it stopped and since then the most we get our of him is 3.5hrs. From 10pm -2am is usually his longest stretch of sleep. Then it's 30mins-2hrs for the rest of the night and same for day time.he goes superong periods of the without a nap (sometimes as long as 8-9hrs) and he does get to a point where he is overtired and just not able to sleep anymore. Fighting it.
He eats and falls asleep in my arms then if I put him down, he is awake again.
He also started crying a lot throughout the day. Not crying...but, rather, whining. Like we have to carry him around or else.
It's exhausting.... I know I'm not offering advice, only cause I'm in the same boat.
Everyone tells me it gets better but I'm not seeing that light at the end of the tunnel quite yet lol instagram moms don't help with their perfect babies that sleep through the night at this age loli also don't really believe in sleep training. I am holding out hope that he will eventually fall into his own routine.

Hang in there, mama!!

My girl is just the same. (My son was a good sleeper, so it really is just luck of the draw.)

With her, I just decided to wait out the evenings until she was ready to go down earlier rather than fighting her for hours to go down at the time I wanted. Now (four months) she's going down about eight, which is much more manageable, but there was nothing on earth I could have done to get her down earlier until she was ready for it.

No advice for daytime sleep; neither of my two has ever slept for longer than 30mins during the day! I just got really good at speed hanging washing!

I don't know if this applies to you, but I was mainly stressed by things like sleep because it felt like I was doing it wrong. When I just accepted that babies are crap (really, they are - adorable at times, but generally just rubbish) and relaxed into doing whatever it took (sling, pram, car), I felt less dreadful about it. She won't still be sleeping on you when she's fifteen!

Courage

@VixFromThe6ix stay strong mama, it’s tough isn’t it? Of course, everyone in my NCT group claims their babies have long 2 hourly naps which doesn’t help with making me feel like I’m doing something wrong.

I just took her out to our local town on a walk, pushed her all around with eyes wide open, then she screamed so we nipped into a coffee shop for a feed and I hoped she would drop off to sleep in the pram after, nope! Just very fussy.

I feel awful though as I had to park her in the utility room and dash out to get the washing in from impending rain clouds leaving her to cry. I was literally putting on the sling and opening up the bassinet and she closed her eyes and fell asleep. I feel terrible that she went to sleep crying!

I so relate!
Last week I put him on the couch while I went to the kitchen to grab a tea (I had a cold). Our apartment is tiny and open concept soon had my eye on him the whole time. He, of course, was crying as soon as I put him down. By the time i put honey and lemon in my tea and stored it, he was asleep.
I felt so bad that he cried himself to sleep.
I guess us ftm all go through the same motions.
:)

Just lost a long post but to summarise, it's normal! And it's fine, once you lower your standard and accept it anyway. Give yourself the third trimester (and first year in my case) at least to roll with what she wants, make life easy for yourself. And don't feel guilty doing stuff when she's awake, lying on a playmat is great for them! You're recovering from birth, and you have an evolutionary smart baby who wouldn't have got eaten by a wolf as they weren't left napping alone. Give yourselves a pat on the back!

Hi OP

9 weeks is too little for a routine. You are fighting against the inevitable I’m afraid! Keep the baby up with you until you’re ready to go to bed; they will almost certainly snooze on you after a while and you can watch TV and chat to your DH. What is he finding especially difficult about the transition? It IS so hard, much harder than people say IMO, but it is also so unbelievably fleeting. In another 9 weeks your baby will already be completely different from the way they are now, with or without you battling over things like routine!

Do you have a bouncer for the baby to sit in? If chores are driving you mad you can put them in there whilst they’re fully awake and chirpy and let them watch you, but I would truly just lean into letting them get proper naps sleeping on you if that’s what they want. They will be happier and easier to manage when they are awake that way.

Good luck and keep going!!

Thank you all for the responses. I think I’ve allowed myself to go a bit crazy by listening to others advice about routines. We were certainly much happier when I just went about my day with her and didn’t worry about getting her to sleep-I’ve felt so trapped trying to stay at home to get her into a sleep routine.

@Crossornot DH is struggling as he is out at work 8-7pm then gets home and immediately starts cooking dinner if I haven’t had a chance or l finishes off a meal that I have say put in the oven. We head up to bed at 9pm and in the interim we try to tag team baby care but inevitably she cries and wants feeding or to be held by me.
He admitted recently he didn’t feel that he bonded with the baby for many weeks and found that tough. He’s also struggled with being so tired at work and his hour each way motorway commute. To top it off his DM was diagnosed with cancer 2 weeks before the baby was born and has just started chemotherapy so he has that on his mind too. They live 1.5 hours away so close enough to feel guilty about not being able to support them more, but far enough away that we can only go on weekends and when we took the baby last time she didn’t manage to make it through the drive without screaming and us having to stop.

OP I really feel for you, I found the first 7 months of sleep deprivation backbreakingly hard. I lived hour to hour round the clock, just doing whatever worked to get the next 40 mins of sleep. Newborns just don’t sleep like older infants, children or adults and that can be so hard to accept/cope with.

In terms of things to try, have you looked at side settling at all? There is a YouTube video here (hoping link works) m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii637ngV_2Q

it looks insane but if you swaddle tightly and persist it might just work. The other thing is that baby will now have a circadian rhythm (admittedly it’s early days but generally we would expect to see babe sleeping more during the night than during the day). This means you can start to make some changes to sleep environments to optimise the chance of naps extending beyond one sleep cycle. Think about darkness and lower temperatures - triggers for humans to sleep. Bf in the pitch black with some calming white noise or other music, room around 18-19’C might just buy you a decent sleep.

Obviously there are no guarantees with babies but those were my initial thoughts, having had a baby who always refused pram/sling naps and was generally a sleep horrorshow. I also have a PhD in this field and still managed to mess everything up 😄 Sending much solidarity, hang in there OP!