Sleep :/

[Rose1999]

I’ve read about so many 4 month olds who sleep 7-7. My daughter is still up 1-2 hourly at night and has a late bedtime (she comes up with me)

I’ve tried and failed to get her into her bed early, including bringing her bed to the living room for the evenings, but she’ll literally only sleep in my arms 😴
She can also cry a lot during the night when transferred from my arms to her basket despite me keeping it warm 😕

My 4 month old has only ever slept a max of 3 hours and that was on one or two occasions. He was doing 2 hourly stints but for the last week it has been every hour on the dot.

I feel it’s too early for a routine as such, so I’m just trying to ride it out.

What is he like during the night?

This is normal. Sleeping 7-7 is bullshit but there will be someone along to correct me. I remember being at a breast feeding clinic and a mother boasting her child slept 10pm til 7am and the health visitor just doing a ‘oh very good’ whilst with a look of bullshit on her face. Then she started back tracking saying, well it might be midnight til 6am. Honestly, tune out the noise and focus on what your baby does, not others.

That’s the night I’m talking about. He’ll do longer naps during the day!

Sounds completely normal for a 4mth old. I have had two DS, neither of mine slept 7 til 7 at 4mths, both EBF. The early days are hard, but it will get easier.

Normal! The 7-7 babies are unicorns. I have 4DC and have spent countless hours at baby/toddler groups and I've only ever come across 1 that did that. And it all fell.apart at 6 months and they were up every 2 hours.

It's not anything your doing wrong. At that age they are a bundle of instincts and you just get what you get with sleep! All mine have had different, even though two were identical twins and were being treated as close to the same as possible.

Do what you can to survive it rather than focussing on what you wish was the case. When baby is older you might well be able to tweak things to get you better sleep. Or you might not need to. In my experience, a routine that works for your baby tends to emerge at around 5.5 months, and then you can adjust it to suit you as needed.

Totally normal (sorry!)

It's perfectly normal for them to still wake multiple times a night at 4 months (actually 4 months is particularly rough for sleep usually!). The parents who supposedly have babies who sleep all night from very little are either making it up (it's a competition some people want to win) or just got very lucky.

I had an NCT friend who had a magical sleeping first baby, when all the rest of us were on our knees. She was the first of us to have a second when her baby was about 18 months. She did not get a magical sleeping second baby and it just about broke her.

You're doing fine. Honestly, if you can, I'd move in the direction of getting baby asleep upstairs and going to bed yourself too. It sounds like you're staying up in the evenings with baby sleeping downstairs with you. Go to bed instead. Get sleep. This will be short lived. But the every hour or two wake ups are a lot easier if you've gone to sleep a few hours earlier yourself and banked some extra sleep.