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Baby crying in sleep

3 replies

KirstTLou · 04/01/2012 10:25

I was wondering if anybody has any advice to offer me on this!
My baby is 4.5mths and has been sleeping through for the last month. She now goes from 7pm-7.30pm but very often she cries in her sleep and I have no idea why. The crying is very confusing and can be upsetting for us as sometimes it is just grisles that she can soothe herself quickly and at other times she sounds truly distressed and wails.
I think this could have been going on for longer than we realised as its only since we moved her into her own room that we've realised she is asleep when she does this, prior to this we would automatically pick her up to feed or soothe her and inadvertently wake her up ourselves.
The strange thing is during the day she is such a happy baby, full of smiles and giggles and rarely getting upset. She seems to enjoy her bedtime routine and goes down to sleep with ease and as we have never let her cry in her cot we are hopeful that she considers it a pleasant place to be.
I did think it could be wind, although she has always been able to bring her wind up with ease but could she have problems with wind in the night that im not aware of?
I really dont know how best to help her, although we now think when she is having these episodes it is best to leave her to it (well, stand outside her room) as when we have tried to comfort her we appear to have escalated the situation and make her worse and it took an hour to settle her, where as by herself she calms anywhere between 5-10 minutes. But its so hard to leave her to do this and is this the right thing to do???
Is there anything I could be doing to stop her crying in her sleep? or dealing with it in a better way??

OP posts:
wearenotinkansas · 04/01/2012 19:21

could she be teething? She might not be so bothered by it in the day when she can chew on things.

or it may be wee bad dreams. DD1 definitely had nightmares but she was much smaller than yours.

nichan · 08/01/2012 06:18

Oh bless her :( could well be teething our 9 month old sometimes crys out in her sleep shes def teething as very dribbly in the day and chewing on everything.

barkermum · 25/01/2012 17:33

My 7.5 month old has just started doing the same! Sometimes she settles herself and other times we have to go in and settle her. However, on a few occassions she has woken herself up fully through crying and then wont go back to sleep. After an hour of hopeing she will drop off again we end up feeding her. I know feeding them back to sleep is the wrong approach, but I dont know what else to do. Has anyone else had this problem?

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