Hello,
My baby is now 15 weeks old and has (in the last week or so) become a lot happier for the most part. This has been the most amazing change for me (and for her too I’m sure!) as her newborn weeks were really quite abysmal. She was so incredibly unsettled and screamed relentlessly for most of the day.
I’ve noticed in the last week that we’ve hit a new sleep ‘milestone’ as out of nowhere she has gone from consistently sleeping 7+ hour stretches overnight, to waking every couple of hours. I understand this to be developmentally normal for the age she’s at (4 month sort of mark) so I’m not looking to do any proper sleep training or to cause her any distress through crying etc.
However, because her newborn days were so difficult and she spent so much time screaming, I think I’ve adopted an irrational mentality whereby I worry that she feels as though I wasn’t there for her and meeting her needs adequately during her newborn days - hence the screaming. I therefore tend to her a lot (even if she’s just doing very minimal fussing) and she is never really left to cry / fuss / whinge ever unless for a few minutes max if I really need a wee or something!
I’ve noticed overnight during some of her wakings that she’s waking but is desperately wanting to still be asleep. She has a dummy and she’s sucking ferociously on her dummy and her eyes are closed, but she appears to startle herself over & over again. Even if it appears as though she’s finally drifted off (she’ll be still and relaxed for 5 mins or so), she tends to jolt back awake out of nowhere. She sleeps in a co-sleeper attached to the side of our bed.
Last night for instance I lay next to her and was holding her hands and shhhing to help her go back to sleep. I was 100% confident she wasn’t hungry and just wanted to sleep. It seemed as though she was going to eventually fall, but in the end she started grizzling and fussing and so I then assumed that meant she wanted or needed comforting / holding to sleep… so I picked her up.
The fussing / grizzling then erupted into much louder crying and her spitting her dummy out and arching her back away from me and squirming in my arms. So that then made me think that she didn’t want holding after all?!
Just not sure what to do in this scenario basically. I don’t want to leave her fussing / grizzling in her cot and have her think I’m not tending to her needs, but equally don’t want to be winding her up by picking her up?!!
For context - she has never been swaddled so I can’t start that now. She doesn’t have reflux and I’ve also tried co-sleeping but it doesn’t make any difference.