Just a quick post to say to all the sleepless SuperMums this morning - IT IS NOTHING YOU ARE DOING!
It's not your supply, bf'ing Mums. It's not the type or quantity of formula you are using.
It maybe teeth.
It maybe sleep regression. Or them getting used to a 90 minute sleep cycle.
It maybe that they can't sooth themselves yet, or that they keep losing their thumb/dummy. Or that they are distracted and want to play because the world is a really exciting place at 3am.
It may be jabs, or a mild illness. It may be that they haven't had a poo for a day or so.
It may be just that they are feeling really small and so they need to be in their happy place next to Mummy.
Who knows? Let's face it, when it comes to sleep babies are dickheads.
And the really cruel part of it all is that the dickheadness only kicks in after you think you are through the 'worst'. After all, everyone says that new babies don't sleep, right? Only they do. Newborns sleep all the effing time which lulls you into a false sense of security as you think you have managed to get the magic one which 'sleeps'.
MWAHAHAHAHA!!
What all those well meaning people should have said is that all babies struggle to learn how to sleep. This struggle seems to start around 12-weeks (at the point they are no longer in a newborn fuzz) and finishes when they finally 'get it' at some indeterminate point in the future.
You might be able to 'help' them to learn how to self soothe if you have an amenable one (cue lots of shushing, patting, rocking, singing and other 'ings that in your former pre-baby life you thought were reserved for drunken nights at Lucky Voice) but for the most part you just have to remember....
IT'S NOT YOU. IT'S THE BABY. So cut yourselves massive amounts of slack lovely ladies and please try not to worry 
I found this on Facebook this morning from the 'Gentle Sleep Book'. I cant paste the link so have just copied it out. It's a nice read for the bf'ing Mums but also thoughtful for the ff'ers as well.
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"If you keep breastfeeding at night your baby will keep waking up in the night to feed."
This is something that so many parents I work with believe. Often they will say to me "it's my own fault, because I'm still breastfeeding" or "I've created a bad habit by feeding at night". Many 'experts' will say similar, suggesting that if you breastfeed your baby at night you will guarantee that they will keep waking up wanting it. I even heard an 'expert' once compare it to being offered a glass of champagne in the middle of the night, i.e: you wouldn't refuse it and would soon develop a habit of drinking champagne at 3am. Honestly this is the sort of rubbish that parents end up believing because it sounds strangely feasible. Only it's not.
Breastfeeding in itself doesn't ever 'make' babies wake at night. When they are little they wake because they are hungry (amongst other reasons) and need to breastfeed to refill their tummies, if they are formula fed the same is no less true however.
Once babies start to eat more solids and their stomachs can take on a significant amount of milk most (not all though!) will be able to make it through the night most of the time (but definitely not all of the time, at 39 I still have a drink in the middle of the night quite often!). They are not waking BECAUSE they are being breastfed though, rather the breast comforts them back to sleep when they wake. Breastfeeding isn't just fuel to babies, it's comfort and pain relief too. If you weren't breastfeeding they would still wake just as much! Because that's what babies do, they wake regularly!
Breastfed babies wake, formula fed babies wake - they wake because they are babies, not because they are obsessed with breasts and somehow wake themselves specifically because they've been dreaming about them!
The difference however lies in the fact that most breastfed babies will almost always need comfort from the breast to go back to sleep (unless you have introduced other ways to comfort them), most bottle fed babies don't take comfort from an empty bottle/when they're not hungry, they have other ways of getting comfort. Cut out the breastfeeding and you don't take this need for comfort away however, they will still wake often and they will still need comfort.
Breastfeeding does not MAKE babies wake. Breastfeeding doesn't create bad habits/habitual feeding at night. Babies wake because they are babies and breastfeeding is how they get calm enough to start a new sleep cycle. It isn't 'the problem', it is 'the solution'!
In time they will take comfort from other things (and you can speed this up too, by working on other ways to comfort, just like parents who formula feed do from the very earliest days). In time ALL babies will night wean of their own accord (and in the truest sense of the term, it is only then that they are "ready to night wean", if they haven't done it themselves then technically they are not 'ready'). You don't need to do anything to make it happen, unless you want to.