What am I doing wrong?

[Kathryn1967]

DS (23 weeks) is 100% BF. He was never a great sleeper but he was slowly improving up until he was 16 weeks when he quickly started to disimprove. The pattern by 19 weeks wasone longish stretch of sleep (4 hours usually) followed by waking every 1-2 hours for a feed. Then we had a couple of weeks when he seemed to be sleeping better, but at present he sleeps for no more than 2 hours at a time, sometmes less. Up until the last couple of weeks, he was, if not hungry, able to self-settle. Now, he needs to feed every time he wakes up or he won't go back to sleep.

He has a good bedtime routine, I've started waking him at 7am and getting him into a napping routine (more BF there I'm afraid). I know he isn't cold/hot. But he just won't sleep!!!! All my friends' babies are sleeping through or only getting up once a night and I feel like such a failure - esp now that he can't seem to self-settle. The only answer I ever seem to get is "solids" or "a formula feed at night". I don't want to do either - I want to follow the WHO guidelines for solids, and everyone I know who started on the formula road ended up with a FF baby. I want what's best for my boy, but what am I doing wrong???? I really feel as though I've made him into a bad sleeper and I feel soooo guilty - as well as more than a little sleep deprived.

Don't feel guilty. It's nothing you've done. Some babies are just ready to sleep through earlier than others. It's enough of a PIA anyway with the sleep deprivation without blaming yourself for it! Formula feed at night probably won't make any difference whatsoever - formula is digested a little more slowly than breast milk, but isn't going to make that much difference. Sorry I've not got any more useful advice for you.

Could he be teething? I wanted to do the WHO guidelines but my daughter just got too hungry and we did go to solids earlier and it worked for us. The difference was that she went from sleeping through for a good month or two and then suddenly waking up. Fully breastfed around the solids.

On another note when dd went to nursery I gave her formula for her 2 daytime milks and then she had bf all other feeds and we did that fine for just over 3months until my milk did eventually dry up.

Well Kathryn I could have written this very post a year ago. I became quite depressed wondering what on earth I had done to deserve such a restless baby, this was made worse by everyone around me having such perfect babies who slept endlessly arrrrgh. In the end I just acceptred that he was never going to be a textbook baby and he still isn't but in the opposite way. He has woken up about 5 minutes ago (from last night) AND he has huge afternoon naps of about 2-3 hours it's bliss and especially weird as all of the mums i knew from before are pulling their hair out and not enjoying the fact that their babies seem to be dropping their naps. Swings and roundabouts.

There is hope!

Babies are all different. I know,I've had 5!!!
My first slept 12 hours a night from 10 weeks, my last only started sleeping through at 12 months and still wakes at 5.30!!!
I did the same with them all, all totally breast fed!
I am afraid its just how it is. Stick with it, stick to a routine that suits you. When you feed in the night, try to do it with the minimum of fuss, feed, dont talk or change(unless needed!)
Good luck.
Rest when you can. Dont feel guilty for having 10 mins with your feet up. Every other job you get time off from!!!

YOU ARE NOT A FAILURE!!!
Every baby is different, yours not sleeping well is almost certainly just what your baby is like, and it is not your 'fault'.
I'm relatively sleep obsessed as far as my ds is concerned (I keep posting on sleep threads!), because he's pretty crap during the day. He sleeps well at night, but I promise you that's a fluke and nothing to do with me being a 'good' or 'bad' mother - it's just the way he is - you aren't alone.

I can offer small bits of advice, but feel free to ignore any of it. Firstly, I have heard that, in the early stages of weaning, babies still get the majority of their calories from bf so weaning/formula may not make any difference. If you're happy bf, keep on bf. But it sounds like the problem is more one of ds not self-settling than necessarily being hungry. (If so, you'd still end up ffing all night to settle him.) What is your bedtime routine? ie what are the triggers that mean "it's time to sleep" for your baby - eg rocking, lullaby, mobile or - in your case- feed. Maybe you could try to add other triggers into your routine, then withdrawing the feed, IYSWIM. I'm not v good at explaining things, tell me if that sounds like gobbledegook!

btw it's not absolutely unheard of for insecure mums to lie and say their child is sleeping through when they're not!! so don't take all that other mums are saying too literally!

ditto, psychobabble, ds has rabbit sucky thing, and although I panicked about him smothering himself during the night with it (you can tell I'm a first time mum...) it really worked well for ds.
LOL feast! so true!

Kathryn, I'm in a similar boat with my ds of 24 weeks, in that he wakes anywhere between once and four or five times during the night and won't go back to sleep except on the breast. Last night he woke at midnight, then at 3am and wouldn't go back down till 5.30am. He's just started on solids in the last week - a little bit of baby rice and pureed veg, and we have had a couple of nights where he's gone from 7pm til 7am, waking only once for a quick BF at around 10ish. Don't know if it's coincidence, since the other nights are just as bad as before... We've had a set bedtime routine since he was 7 weeks old, and he does go down absolutely fine most of the time, so I do think that helps. Also, like 2manyglasses, we give him a small cloth toy (not big enough to smother him) so that he associates that with going to sleep. Seems to help... I can do the daytime naps and putting him down at 7pm. What I can't seem to crack is the constant nighttime waking for a couple of sucks on my breast. I just don't know when/if it will ever come to an end Anyway, sorry, not much advice here, but just wanted to let you know you're not alone!

Auntybrandybutter - 5 wow! Take my hat off to u! It was really encouraging to hear how different yours were even though you did the same with all of them. Just goes to show all babes are different. Some sleep, some don't no matter what you do. My DD2 just didn't sleep and I get really annoyed with people who assume it is down to 'bad sleep training'.

You are definitely not alone! I sometimes think my dd would get the prize for being the worst ever sleeper. Her sleep got steadily worse and worse till about 5 months, when she was sleeping in 15 minute chunks in the day and waking every 2 hours in the night. It has got a bit better since then (she's 6.5 months now) but she still wakes up 2-4 times a night. I've tried every technique there is apart from cc and it hasn't made a difference - only time seems to improve things. Solids haven't helped btw, and she's occasionally had a bottle of formula as a dreamfeed if I haven't expressed enough and that makes no difference either. Sorry not to have any advice but I guess it helps to know that you're not alone.

teeth? You are So not a failure! Bugger that! He is a person in his own (tiny) right. He is doing this not YOU! babies are amazingly different to each other and to their parents. You are doing NOTHING wrong. It's shit, the not-sleeping, I have non-sleeping kids too. Ds was a NIGHTMARE for the first 8months. Never bloody slept. DD started out well, fell apart. But they are best children in the world.

And solids do nothing whatsoever to help IME.

I'd love five children. Sigh. Totally impossible. Far too old, and can't take the sleep deprivation.

Thank you all. Am taking the advice to heart - trying not to stress about it and to just go with the flow. Which I was able to do just fine until he stopped being able to settle himself off and then of course I started feeling guilty for ever having nursed him to sleep! So even though I can see a little white dot on his gum which means his teeth are moving around again, I am working on accepting that his non-sleeping is, as you say, just one of those things... (Had completely bizarre conversation with mother yesterday in which the dreaded solids were recommended again - chocolate mousse was recommended as a first food because it will slide down easily! As if getting the food down him is likely to be the problem! Must admit, that made me feel better too - my self-confidence was at rock bottom but now I can just think "how mad are they?" Most consoling!)