Baby night sleep

[Ellebel]

Hi all,
I have a nearly 5 month old that is very much in a sleep regression. It’s been 1.5 months so far. We have a bedtime routine and he goes down been 6.30-7 every night. He sleeps for 4 hours, wakes for feed. Then is up every two hours after that until 4.30/5am when he is up for the day. I try everything to extend the sleep but he is just wide awake. I've tried putting him down earlier and later but it makes no difference, 5am is morning!

We follow 1.5-2 hour wake windows during the day and he is usually getting around 3.5 hours of naps. We struggle with getting his naps longer than one sleep cycle.

My questions are- any advice on how to extend sleep? Should I be thinking of trying the Ferber method? The thing is he does seem hungry every time he wakes at night drinking between 100-150mls (he is fully bottle fed) He actually seems to now feed much more at night than during the day.

I can’t maintain such broken sleep much longer, I know he’s capable of good sleep as at 2 months he was doing 7 hour stretches! But that now seems a distant memory…

White noise machine saved my life.

Is he having a bottle every time he wakes in the night?

How long did you try the later bedtimes for? It can take a week for them to settle into new routine

Have a look at the No Cry Sleep Solution. It has some advice in early waking if I remember correctly

I wouldn’t rule out Ferber, although I would say buy the book first and read it properly rather than a brief internet summary, as it is a really interesting read on infant sleep. However, you first need to address the day versus night feeding imbalance. Sleep training is to teach self soothing, and it’s not going to work if baby is starving hungry at night because they haven’t fed enough in the day. How often are you feeding during they day? I’d be tempted to offer a bottle every 3 hours. You could also do a dream feed as you go to bed to hopefully extended that first stretch of sleep.

I'd agree with feeding every 3 hours in the day and offering a dream feed too.

Thanks for your responses. He used to feed really well during the day- 150ml every 3ish hours. Then at around 3 months he got very fussy, getting any milk down him became a struggle so now we aim for bottles every 3 hours but often end up feeding little and often just to get milk down him. At night it’s a different story, he drinks between 100-150 mls at 10, 1, 3 and 5…

So I know I can’t sleep train until we manage to flip feeding back to day time just really not sure how without feeding him less at night and letting him cry…

The 10pm feed is often a dream feed if he hasn’t woken up. It’s after that he wakes me up!

To be fair we haven’t consistently tried a later bed time so I’ve pushed it back an hour tonight and will try that for a full week and see if any change in the 5am get up! Fingers crossed!

Sounds like he might be reverse cycling. I would try offering a feed every 2.5 to 3 hours and try feeding him somewhere quiet with few distractions for at least some of his feeds.

Could he need to go up a teat size?

Firstly try and get more milk in him during the day to see if that helps. I agree with PP that a bottle in a quiet dark room might help without distractions, or when he wakes from a nap and is still sleepy.

I would also try a later bedtime if you can to see if this helps. It might need trialling for a few nights before you see a difference, just trying it for a night or two won’t help. Maybe he only needs 10 hours of night sleep at his age until more naps are dropped, so if he’s going to bed at 6:30 then this might be too early for him to sleep later into the morning. Our 4 month old currently goes to sleep at about 8:30 and is up at 7am, unfortunately with a lot of night feeds too!