5.5 month old waking 2 hourly in the night

[Milkino07]

Hi!

My daughter is 5 and a half months old, and still wakes every 2 hours in the night. She goes down at between 6.30-7pm, but wakes at 9, 11, 1, 3, 5am, pretty much without fail.

She was EBF but I'm moving to formula slowly for going back to work (I can't express much), and she's also started weaning - absolutely adores all food so far.

When she wakes she pretty much only settles if she's fed. She doesn't fall asleep at the boob/bottle. Occasionally she will fall back asleep with encouragement, but more often than not, I do have to feed her (I've tried persevering, but just ended up with her awake for like a 2 hours through the night 😂).

She's reliant on a dummy to fall asleep, and
when she wakes, I think it's usually because she's in a light sleep and realises she's lost it. She screams if we try to put her down without it.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to encourage her to sleep more in the night?? I don't expect her to sleep through completely but I'm panicking about going back to work as I'm shattered.

I've started wondering if we should get rid of the dummy as I think she might not wake if she wasn't stressing that it's fallen out? But I have no idea how to get her to sleep without it really :/

Thanks!

Have you checked for a tooth starting to come through? DS is 6 months and had been doing this for the last 2 weeks. He stopped a couple of nights ago and then I noticed a tooth had broke the gum so I’m guessing it was that. If you think it might be teething I would try some teething gel/a dose of calpol and see if it makes a difference

She does have two teeth looking to come through soon, but this has been her sleeping pattern since she was born pretty much 😭

This is my pattern with ds 7mths and has been since he was 3 days old. Although I've noticed now his two little teeth are through he just wakes out of habit. Quick latch to the boob, flips back on and off a few times then let's our a snore and I can put him back in bed

This morning I've brought him back into my bed again for cuddles though as he was so cute... I couldn't help myself

I had this with my son. Eventually, at 5 months, figured out that he was actually undertired because I was trying to get him to sleep too much. He was having 3 hours of daytime sleep and then I was putting him down for 12 hours overnight.... basically I was trying to get him to sleep 15 hours a day which most 5 month olds just cant do. I stretched out his wake windows to 2.25/2.5/2.75/3.25 and it improved nights after only a few days. He still wakes up once or twice a night but it's so much better than it was.

What's your schedule like?

I was in a very similar situation a month or so ago with my 6mo - he was waking every 2 hours for either the dummy to be replaced or a feed (ebf too). In the end we got rid of the dummy at night, and it improved things almost immediately. The first night was horrible, he cried for about 20 mins, with my partner going in every 5 minutes to comfort him (I would have given in), but after that it went down to less than 5 mins crying and now he doesn't cry at all, just rubs his comforter over his face and goes to sleep. From that first night he started waking only once a night, we do give a dream feed at 10.30pm and then he'll wake for a feed at about 4am and back to sleep till 7. The dream feed really works for us, but some don't like it. Also, we moved him into his own room which I think helped too Anyway, I feel human again - I can live off that amount of sleep, unlike the 5/6 wake ups a night we had before!

I've kept the dummy in the day for naps and if he's unsettled (he's quite a grizzly baby) and that's been working fine and hasn't ruined the night progress.

Hope that helps!

This is interesting! Her wake window is generally 2 hours at most, and she naps for maybe 2.5 hours a day at most. I'll try stretching the windows a bit to see if that helps! Thank you