10 week old baby’s already bad sleep getting worse

[Isabellamt]

My 10 week old daughter’s sleep is so bad and it’s getting worse. For the past few weeks she’s generally given us a 3 hour stretch from about 8pm to 11pm, fed, then another 2ish hour stretch from around midnight to 2am. From 2am she would then wake pretty much hourly until morning, but the past couple of nights even that already bad sleep schedule has gotten worse. Shes now shortening her ‘long’ stretches of sleep and waking every 30-40 minutes pretty much all night. Tonight she didn’t go down properly until after 9:30pm, gave us an almost 3 hour stretch until 20 past midnight, fed and fell back asleep for 40 minutes only then woke again. In the day she only sleeps well when contact napping, generally waking within 10-30 minutes once placed in her cot. What am I doing wrong? Why won’t she just sleep? My son was sleeping 5+ hours straight at a time by her age. Any advice welcome…

Breast or bottle?

Your doing nothing wrong. It’s tough, and brutal
when you’re in the depths of it. But it’ll pass! I thought my first was bad, but my second….yoikes.some of them just don’t sleep. It won’t be forever

@Toodledootwo when did it start to get better for you? I’m so tired :(

@AlwayAnxious fully bottle fed now as of about 3 weeks ago

Gosh! I don’t want to make you feel
worse! 🤣 if baby is fully bottle fed can’t you take a break and a night off?

it’s been a long time since I had a baby but I remember how hard it was. I bottle fed too so no judgement. Given the timeline of bottle feeding and changes in sleep pattern, I wonder if the baby is allergic to the milk ingredients? Could the baby have silent reflux? Or colic?

might be worth diarising and a trip to the doctors.

You're not doing anything 'wrong'. Some babies wake a lot, it is exhausting but completely normal. They need some reassurance usually.

You can't judge one baby against another, they're just different.

The first priority is to get some sleep yourself - is her dad there? Can he look after her for a four hour stretch so you can sleep?

@Toodledootwo me and her dad do take shifts, so I did sleep from 8:30pm until 12:30am last night thankfully. I just want her to get better at sleeping so we can all enjoy being a family again. Please let me know when it got better for you!

Normal for a ten week old sorry.

You’re not doing anything wrong. Every baby is different, they need different amounts of sleep, food and comfort. I don’t want to alarm you but most babies are up and down in sleep for at least the first year, it’s not linear - starts bad and just gradually gets better - it goes up and down with growth spurts, development etc. What you describe sounds very normal for a 10 week old. I’d just try to prioritise your rest as much as you can, is older child with you or in childcare at all?

I had 2 and they were both like this but especially my son who done his first 3 hour stretch about 7 months and didn’t sleep through the night until 18 months so the fact you are already getting 3 hour stretch.
My 13 month old has always been all over the place but could count the amount of 3hr stretches I had from her before 1 on one hand but she’s been quite consistently on 2 wakes ups for 2 months now so hoping the end is in sight

You’re not doing anything wrong
some are just not great sleepers, some just go through periods. I did everything, followed every class, googled everything, read every study I could find, I just could not get my baby to sleep longer than an hour at a time. The only things I didn’t do were sleep training, and after formula (which everyone told me would fix it!) didn’t fix it, I gave up. They figured it out eventually and until then I slept as much as I could, expressed so I could sometimes have 2 hours sleep at a time and dh could feed, and eventually after must fretting, started co sleeping so I at least didn’t have to wake up properly each time the baby did.

your baby may be going through a development phase, may have a little niggling sickness, or this might just be them. You’ll get through it, it’s hard because it’s hard, not because you’re doing anything wrong

Entirely normal youre not doing anything wrong. Can you safely cosleep? Youll get far more sleep

Will your baby take a dummy?

@BuffaloCauliflower thank you. I think I’m starting to realise we got very lucky with our son who slept well from early on. He also never wanted to contact nap so this is a very different experience for us. Our son is in nursery 3 days and week which does help a lot. Just hoping the sleep gets better soon and life gets a bit easier 🙏

@Pumpkindoodles thank you so much. I think from what everyone is saying it sounds like we just have to wait it out as opposed to trying to ‘fix’ it. Just hope we don’t have to wait too much longer… 😅

@Meand2Ls wow that’s tough! Thank you for sharing your experience. I think I need to stop using my son as a benchmark and appreciate that every baby is different ❤️

It’s the 3 month sleep regression unfortunately. This is in some ways the hardest time for sleep - I actually sleep trained my kid from 4 months (most people say you can do it from 6 months) and that worked for me really really well but loads of people will be super anti it. They are super happy well balanced toddlers and I was a much happier mother for most nights sleeping well.

You’re doing nothing wrong and at 10 weeks there’s nothing you can do to put it right I’m afraid. Keep to your routine, hang in in there and I hope you like coffee. My eldest didn’t reliably sleep through until he was 3, my youngest was much better and from about 6 months was reliably doing 6 hour stretches. You have my sympathies, it is hard.

This may not be helpful as other comments say this is normal and I only have my own experience to go off but 8pm seems quite an early bedtime at 10 weeks old. My 9 week old goes to sleep between 10-11pm and first wakes between 5-6am and will then go back down for a couple of hours until about 8.30am after a feed. I do appreciate all babies are different and I am very lucky at this stage!! I make sure to keep the bedtime routine the same every night and keep it quiet except white noise and lights low when doing bedtime to try and teach her the difference between day and night (probably still a bit early for her to know but good to get into the routine now) and keep the house bright and not silent during the day even while she is napping

Yeah I’d agree with PP, id try a much later bedtime. at that age mine didn’t go to bed til 10/11pm but then would do her longest stretch alongside ours. Plenty of day light and fresh air.

I’d have realistic expectations-night wakes are totally normal in the first few years

I had this situation with my 2nd baby too. I got him into a habit of falling asleep in a pram. Things came to a head around 10 pm on a cold rainy January night. I just knew that going out was not an option and he would not settle indoors.

I used Baby Whisperer's technique. It's a variation of controlled crying. The only difference is that you don't leave your baby and disappears. You stay close, maintain physical contact with the baby but still let them cry tears of frustration. You basically tell them that you are near and ready to step in, however falling asleep is their job, not yours.

Baby Whisperer used to work as a neonatal nurse so she is very knowledgeable about babies. She has different techniques for different ages. The technique I used is from Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems, pp, 181-186.

I have to say, you must be pretty desperate to try her method. However, it did work very quickly. My son screamed "Murder" for 45 minutes and then slept for 5 hours. It got much better within a couple of days. I used a lot of tips from that book

If you absolutely against the idea of letting you baby cry, you can try No Cry Sleep Solutions by Elizabeth Pantley.

I hope it helps