When your baby starts waking more frequently do you feed back to sleep?

[izpie]

20week dd has always been a crap sleeper but we had improved to a point where she was only waking twice for feeds. Last few nights she has been up an extra couple of times & is also waking at 5ish. I've fed her back to sleep for each waking. Wondering if this is going to perpetuate the wakings as she gets used to more night milk- what else can I do (can't cope with night time screaming)? Definitely not growth spurt as she is not demanding more milk in the day.

Well, I've been up with my DS since 5:45am, had a bad night last night. Woke up alot! He's 8 months.

We have about 5 good nights - where he'll wake once, I'll feed him and he sleeps fine. The other 2 are usually waking about 4-5 times a night and getting up at 5am!
They go through stages. I found the later he goes to bed, the nights are worse. So I make sure he's in bed, every night at 7-7:30pm.
Sorry no real advice but you are not alone!!

PS - try and nap when she does, will save you from going mad!

Depends. DS is ill at the moment so i feed him to sleep as much for comfort as anything. He keeps waking with his eyes fused together because of conjuntivitus which scares him. He's also been having some teething pain and a growth spurt!

If he's fine and i'm pretty certain it's not hunger (no full on cry, just a bit of complaining) or a growth spurt i leave him and see if he will go back to sleep on his own. If it's just habit, i give him a comforter and he goes back to sleep. If he's hungry or really needs comforting he gets louder and i feed him.

Everyone goes on about the 4 month sleep regression but i've found 20+ weeks the hardest without doubt. DS is nearly 22 weeks.

DS is 12 weeks old. He cannot really last comfortably more than 3 - 3.5 hrs without food (although have been known to last 4 hours), so he wakes up twice in the night to feed. At both times he takes really good large feeds. If he wakes up more often (thankfully, a rare occurrence), I try to get him to sleep without food.

My DS is nearly 7 mo and has been mainly only waking once a night around 4am for a feed for the last 7ish weeks. Sometimes he wakes earlier in the night around 2am and I feed him then and then he wakes again a few hours later and I feed him back to sleep. He is not really hungry for this second feed but it is just easier to do this than try and settle him. It doesn't seem to make him wake more often doing this. If he wakes and will not self-settle earlier than 2am I never feed him now as I know it is not hunger and I don't want him to start thinking he can get a feed earlier in the night. We worked hard to get him to sleep through as he does and don't want to sabotage it.

Saying that the last few nights he has started not going back to sleep after his early morning feed. Last night he was awake from 2.30am - 5am, had a brief nap and then woke again 5.45am

I am putting this recent blip down to him being on the cusp of doing something exciting like starting to roll over or crawl. Hopefully it will pass soon (fingers and toes crossed)

Hi, my DD is almost 6 months and wakes usually around 1am and 6am, I always feed back to sleep as it's the quickest way to get more sleep myself.

She went through a stage a few weeks ago of waking 3 or 4 times in the night and it got to the stage where I thought I was doing something wrong, as I didn't want her to wake and expect milk, then I read that daytime feeds become shorter because baby is busy (or in my DD's case, nosy!) so they need to make up the calories they need at night.

I just went with it and fed as necessary and increased feeds in the day even when she didn't ask and she's gradually getting better. We've had two nights when she's gone right through and I have done nothing different on these nights.

I will also add that as you're coming close to weaning age, not to substitute milk for solids too early for the same reason, milk has more calories.
We are weaning and this coincided with DD sleep getting worse, and that's what I read. I'm careful now to always offer milk first and it seems to be working.

We found that trying to rock etc. back to sleep our 22wo rather than feed him has definitely helped with reducing night wakings - he used to wake up every hour but now we get 6 hour stretches reasonably regularly. You do have to find energy from somewhere to do this though and be prepared to tolerate a little bit of crying (although in your arms rather than left alone) so we do usually only do it for the first night waking. He's 0.4th percentile and has been doing 12-7 without milk for a few weeks now. I made sure I fed more during the day to compensate and he is gaining weight fine on his percentile.

Just wanted to report from 'the other side'! My DD is now 8 months old and almost always sleeps through. For a long time she was waking 2-3 times a night and I always BFed her back to sleep, without fail. I worried that this would cause future issues but she slowly but steadily stretched out the gaps herself. Not saying that I've got it sussed for good, but I just wanted to say that feeding to sleep worked for us and that you shouldn't worry too much about 'rods for backs'. Good luck!

It depends - if ds settles fairly quickly with a cuddle from DP then I don't feed him, if he screamed I would!

He's 8.5 months now and after finally dropping all night feeds he's waking a lot at the moment due to teething/eczema/general illness. I was feeding him all night but have now discovered that he'll actually sleep fine snuggled up with DP and I can sleep in the other room, so we are all sleeping better like this at the moment.