7 month old woes

[AngelDog]

Just a rant, really - I wanted to get this off my chest and there's only so much whingeing I can inflict on DH.

DS has never been a great sleeper but now wakes 2 hourly through the night. Usually he wants to either play or feed when he wakes up. I always feed him and he generally goes back off. He sleeps on a mattress on the floor next to me so I can feed him lying down and not worry about moving him after feeds.

Last night I fed him at 02.45 and didn't manage to get him back off till around 5.45am as he wanted to roll and play on his stomach. I didn't manage to get back to sleep at all - boo.

During the day I feed him to sleep. He will feed to sleep and stay asleep on my lap, but if I try to put him down, he wakes instantly and won't go back to sleep. Previous attempts to feed him to sleep while lying down & then leave him on the bed have been unsuccessful as he's not that keen on feeding lying down during the day.

Pushchair / car naps often involve a lot of shrieking before DS goes to sleep (if he does), and he usually wakes after 20 mins unless you're still moving. The sling always works but I'm not supposed to use it due to suspected back problems.

I have about a million things to do in the house and am beginning to get a bit fed up. We have Very Low Standards when it comes to the housework but DS is now picking up bits of dirt around his mouth when he's playing on his tummy.

DH helps (bless the man, he made cakes last night - neither of us copes without it!) but I do all the nights since he's had problems with insomnia in the past, and hasn't been able to get DS to sleep without the sling or pram since he was a few weeks old.

I know it'll pass. I just wish it would hurry up!

Moan over...

my DH keeps telling me off for reading baby sleep books in the bath . I cant help it!!!! At least we can talk to each other and compare notes.

That is a super nap!!! DS manages 90 mins a most which I think is all he wants really but that might be because I give him a super early bedtime (half 6)

My next challenge is to get him to wake at 7 - he's a 6am riser but I've tried shifting bedtime gradually and he's having none of it

6am - well, it's better than 5! DS seems to be settling around 6.30 which isn't quite as nice as seven, but is not bad at all really.

I thought after such a long nap that DS might resist his 7pm bedtime (he woke at 3pm). In retrospect I should have put him to bed earlier as he was definitely tired. He had been up since 5.30am, poor boy, so I should have known better.

Hello, my nearly 7-month DS is also having sleep difficulties. We have him in bed, breastfeeding after his bath and clean pajamas at 8pm. Normally he feeds about 20-25 minutes and falls asleep somewhere near the beginning of this..........

We used to give him a bottle of formula with infant Gaviscon the first time he woke in the night, sometimes 11pm and sometimes 1am, as his sleep improved (he suffers from reflux and has done since birth). My partner thought it would be a good idea to give him this bottle at bedtime, topped up with breastfeeding so he wouldn't wake up with reflux later.

The last two nights, DS has decided to play, play, play after this bottle and breastfeeding. Normally he feeds to sleep with no problem. Now he's up and rolling around, on all fours and rocking back and forth, just everything really.

Is it the bottle? Is it the teething gel we put in his mouth - could it be desensitising his mouth and making him not want to breastfeed? Is it just a 7-month old thing? I know he's quite pleased with himself that he can get up on all fours and that he can roll around, but it's not as if he hasn't been playing all day long!!!

Hi Jo sorry to hear of your woes! Sleep does go funny when they learn something new...

This might not work but I'd try putting him to bed earlier - if he falls asleep at the start of the feed it means he needs to go to bed earlier. Try half an hour earlier. Early bedtime means better sleep - especially as he's likely to be getting overtired from the nightly play time! I have to do this with DS otherwise it's a bad night in store!

Two thoughts came to mind re the formula. 1-breastmilk helps your baby sleep through hormones so perhaps he's not getting enough now he has formula first hence not feeding to sleep. 2-formula is quite hard to digest and reflux babies tend to have more sensitive digestive systems (my DS has reflux). I'd try ditching the bottle - you can give gaviscon via a syringe before his bedtime feed. This is what we did. The combination of the two might be keeping him up!

Hi Jo - no advice other than that Iggly knows what she's talking about!

Mixed progress here. Last night DS only woke me once. Although he seemed to want to play, he had a huge feed when I offered, then unlatched himself, rolled over and went to sleep. :)

On the other hand, he is still predictably waking at the end of his first 2 cycles (45 mins after bedtime and about 1.5 hours after that). He is also wanting to start the day early - between 5.15 and 5.45am especially since it messes up the rest of the day.

Yesterday I couldn't get him to nap till 9.20am, after waking at 5.15. He ended up with 3 naps of 30 mins or so and was in a foul temper all day. Today has been better, but his afternoon nap was late morning and not that long, so he'll need another before bedtime.

Any ideas to stop early waking other than using extra blackouts / moving bedtime earlier? (He was in bed by 6.15pm yesterday - normally around 7pm. It apparently made no difference, but I'll give it a week and see).

I did wonder whether he was waking early because he'd had so much daytime sleep and just didn't need so much at night, but yesterday's short naps and today's 5.30am start seem to suggest otherwise.

TBH I have no answers to the early wake up. It became a vicious cycle - he'd wake early, naps would be screwed, overtired etc etc. I just kept him on the same nap schedule every day. I also refused to let him wake up at 5.15am - well either DH or I would let him sleep on us as that was the only way he'd relax enough to keep dozing until a more respectable hour. This went on for a couple of weeks then the later wake up of 6-6.30am resumed .

Although I did notice one night in the midst of his early waking he'd gone to bed an hour later than normal (he wouldn't settle), and he woke up later the next morning. Didn't work again though!!

I'm not sure but I think it's something to do with the transition from 3 to 2 naps - he dropped his afternoon nap around 9 months but would still get a bit tired and some days would fall asleep in the pushchair/car so he obviously needed something in the afternoon. So he was overtired for a while, hence the early wakings? Now at 10 months, he's firmly used to two naps a day so the early wakings have gone. Just a theory!

Thanks, Iggly. Your theory makes sense to me - on days like this when he wakes early, he needs 3 naps (and they're usually only short). When he's woken at a sensible hour he's had 2 naps with the second being very long. He's happily gone to bed early on both types of days.

When he's woken up at a sensible time, he's done roughly 2-3-4 between naps. When he's woken early, awake intervals have been more like 2-2-2-3.

When you say you kept him on the same nap schedule every day, do you mean you kept trying to have his naps at the same times, or the same length of time after waking?

I don't let him get up before 6.30 but I can't find a way of getting him to go back to sleep. He wakes, I feed him lying down (he's on a mattress on the floor next to me) and he is then wide awake and chatty. I just lie there and cuddle him with no eye contact or talking, but he doesn't go back to sleep. I've tried jiggling / rocking but he just gets cross. Experience shows that if feeding doesn't send him off again, it will almost certainly be at least an hour and a half before he hits a drowsy window again.

Of course, our friend Weissbluth says I should just ignore him and he'll stop fighting sleep for the pleasure of my company.

I wonder if something else is going on, though, as when he woke 45 mins after bedtime today he got himself into a bit of a state - I got him pretty much to sleep again but he went a bit mental when I tried to put him down. Then he refused to feed again, which is pretty unusual.

I wish he'd sort himself out so I can get my social life back! I took him out today as soon as he woke from his last nap but it was a rush to get him home in time to give him dinner & get him to bed. Because we only have around 50% success with pushchair / car naps, I daren't take him out over a possible nap time as there is a 50% probability he will miss that nap completely, and I daredn't do anything which might result in more night wakings.

My hope is that once he settles into a more predictable pattern and he's used to going to sleep at the same sort of time, he'll find it easier to sleep when out and about. But 25 minutes of shrieking before dropping off makes going out seem like too much effort really.

This too shall pass, eh?

Oh, and the friend I was visiting today has a nine week old. Mum & Dad are tired but surviving. Last night their DD slept from 11pm till 5am. I think the last time DS did anything like that was around Easter...

It will pass. I promise you. If your DS is anything like mine, his sleep will get SO much better soon and you will wonder what happened! (touch wood in case DS proves me wrong tonight ).

I would put him down at the same time give or take 15 mins for naps. I tried the same length of time instead and it just didn't work at all. He'd become a mess!

DS has been having freakouts at night sometimes - he usually just needs an extra cuddle and I can't put him down until he's asleep. I think it was when he had teeth coming through. The top two gave him a lot more trouble than the bottom ones.

I think it's all a bit of a rocky period - establishing on solids, dropping a nap, learning new things (did I tell you about the time DS was awake for an hour between 2 and 3am for a couple of nights, waving at me, as it was a new trick for him ).

I haven't done pushchair/car naps in a long time as trying to re-establish a pattern! We go on holiday in less than two weeks so I will have to - hopefully he'll be okay by then as we've been on the same timetable for a while now.

Have you considered putting him in a cot? I know it's hard to give up co-sleeping, but I put DS in his cot for his naps as I think I was distracting him. At night he wakes up and babbles away but drifts off again (we hear him on the monitor going dadadadada really loudly then silence ) - if we were there I'd think he'd go mad! Although putting him in a cot now might not be such a good idea as too much change.

x-post - 11pm til 5am at 9 weeks?!?!?!?! DS has only just started doing that

Yes, I had thought about changing to the cot at night but I was hoping to wait till he woke up a bit less frequently. I think it's probably not worth the hassle at the moment, especially since he seems to wake more frequently during the evenings on his own than he does during the night with me (at the moment, at least). I suppose I could try it for a few nights and see how it goes.

Love the waving thing (although I bet you didn't at the time!)

Not impressed at the time no! But laugh now.

Although not laughing this morning - 5am wake up call!!!

Maybe we've swapped babies - DS woke at 6 and I think may have gone back to sleep until 6.30 as I definitely did. :)

That's nice - a lie in. Although since when did 6.30am become a lie in, I do not know

Everything you previously thought was normal changes when you have children. :)

Something I've been wondering - if you're feeding to sleep and trying to work out how long they've slept, when do you start counting from? When they first shut their eyes, or when you unlatch them & put them down?

I managed to put DS in his cot this morning. He woke after 20 mins despite patting him when he stirred. Fed to sleep again, in cot again, then the phone rang and that was that.

In cot again at lunchtime but woke 20 mins later. Fed & left him on my lap - woke after 20 mins again. Asleep again now but thinking about waking every few minutes. Urgh. Still, getting him in his cot at all is progress, I suppose.

Mmm not sure on the feeding to sleep. I usually watch DS and can guess most times by his breathing and wriggling. He really wriggles at first then calms down! But I like to play it safe sometimes and count from when the eyes close so it's a nice surprise if he wakes later!

Hi angel The Book has arrived! I'm trying to read and put the shopping away

Ooh, exciting.

What's the betting tonight will be the first time your DS sleeps through, but you're exhausted having sat up all night reading?

I had to go out this morning and DS slept in the pushchair with only a bit of complaining. :)

He was hard to settle when he woke from the first 3 cycles last night - he had bad wind. Seriously, when I went into the bedroom it reeked. I'm ntot sure what food was the culprit.

It continued today - he slept in his cot for 30 mins at lunchtime but I couldn't put him down for the next cycle as he decided to do a big poo instead.

I bet he wakes up every two hours as if to say "I bet the book doesn't give you the answers"

Poor DS with his wind. It's terrible when that happens. Glad he slept in his pushchair though! Finally give you the chance to get out although the weather has made a turn for the worse (here in London anyway)!

Yes, it was lovely to be out! I think I'll wait a while before trying it for the lunchtime nap though as DS was getting pretty cross on the way home at lunchtime.

We've definitely made progress with the nights. DS slept from half midnight to 5.40am, which was fantastic. He slept through one other cycle change earlier in the night.

I am using PUPD when he wakes after the first 2 / 3 cycles in the evening - more by accident than design, though. I'm trying to resettle without a feed and it's easy to get him to sleep again, but he complains again as soon as I put him down. The longest it took yesterday was 20 mins so not bad. He only does grizzly complaining rather than crying crying IYSWIM and he doesn't get into a tizz with the PUPD, which surprised me. I've never tried it at bedtime or for naps as I think he'd just have hysterics and I'd be unable to calm him, but when he wakes during the evening it's different - perhaps because he really wants to be asleep. I'll be interested to see if it improves matters at all.

That's excellent angel - nice to be making progress.

Oh I'm reading the book and it's like wading through treacle. So dense! Maybe it's because I was tired - I'll have another go tonight. I much prefer HSHSC!

Hmm...and I wouldn't say that HSHHC was the most well-organised or clearly written book either.

Good luck!

Thought I'd update in case anyone cares is interested.

DS is still waking after every sleep cycle in the evening, but is much faster to settle - 2 minutes of PUPD and he's sorted. I'm hoping he may stop needing my help soon.

We've had a couple of nights of sleeping for 5 hours in the night which has been nice. Mind you, last night he was awake between 4 and 5.30 after not quite feeding to sleep.

I think he generally only needs one feed a night. I can tell he's having a proper feed now, and he will often unlatch himself, turn his head away from me and go to sleep (just like Elizabeth Pantley describes). It's amazing, after months of having to unlatch him myself.

The 9am / 1pm nap schedule is working a treat. He consistently does 30 mins in the morning and 2 hours at lunchtime, although he needs resettling between every cycle then. I can put him in his cot for the morning nap and the first part of the afternoon nap, although he protests after that. If we can get the nights cracked, then I'll get serious with getting him in the cot for all of his afternoon nap, but until then, I daredn't mess too much with the daytimes.

We still have a few early mornings, but I'm sure that's slight overtiredness due to the transition to 2 naps. Iggly, I was reading the Sleepytot website and she said something similar about the transition between needing different numbers of naps.

Glad to hear how things have changed Angel especially the 5 hour chunks of sleep

I've tried to tackle Ferber's book and again I just couldn't face it. You're more than welcome to borrow it if you like!

I've just had a quick skim of the sleeptot website as it's one I've not read properly I'm interested in introducing a lovey for DS as he doesn't have one. Especially as I go back to work soon so want him to have some security :(