False Starts

[AmiraS]

Can someone please help, FTM I have a 12 week old baby… I have tried for 9/10pm bedtime but every night after 45 mins she will wake up crying maybe a few times but always after 45 mins. Her naps are never longer than 35/45 mins. What can I do about this, has anyone dealt with this. Her wake window is normally around 1 hour 25 minutes. How do I start teaching self settling?

Sounds like she's on 45 minute sleep cycles. My baby was like this but it was 38 minutes. He would wake from every nap after 38 minutes like clockwork!

This is normal for a lot of babies this age unfortunately, consolidating sleep is developmental so she should start sleeping longer in the next few months. I think my baby was around 4.5 months when he started going down for nice long 1.5 hours naps in his cot.

As regards the night sleep, I'm not sure what would be causing that....my baby did that too but not until he was a few weeks older than yours and it was the dreaded 4 month sleep regression. Are the false starts at night new?

We switched to an earlier bedtime at about 12 weeks - had to experiment a bit but about 7.15pm worked well. She's been getting increasingly grumpy, over-tired and disturbed by noises if downstairs with us any longer than that in the evening. We then did a dream feed at around 10.15pm when we went to bed.

We found the 'pause' thing helped to consolidate sleep cycles - so if she stirred we paused for a few seconds to check whether she was hungry or something else. About half the time she'd sigh or fart or grunt then settle back into sleep. And we also seized any opportunity for the infamous putting down 'sleepy but awake' as it means they are used to getting themselves to sleep without being rocked/fed etc. We tried to do that once a day but it really was a case of seizing any opportunity!

Waking every 45 mins (every sleep cycle) is pretty normal at this age, if you want her to go down for a bedtime, you will probably need to go and resettle every 45 mins IME. Or do you mean that at the first wake up she doesn't go back down?

Self settling isn't really something you can teach, babies either do it or they don't, just keep trying and eventually she will get there, but it's perfectly fine to keep soothing for sleep - she won't need it forever.

Just a phase IME. We could set our watch by DD for a month or two, always exactly 45 mins after she first went to sleep. We didn't really do anything special, we just resettled her and she grew out of it.