evening crying 7 week old - tips for settling

[rhetorician]

DD2 is almost 7 weeks old, breastfed, and is just very unsettled from about 5-9 most evenings. I know this is normal - she latches, cries, pulls off, cries to go back on - over and over. It's as if she just can't drop off to sleep. Is the only remedy time, or is there something else we can do. During the day she sleeps upstairs in moses basket fairly consistently, but evenings she is downstairs with us. I wonder if we might not be better off with her upstairs - problem is that it's a small house, we have a toddler and the baby now cries pretty loudly. DP is getting a bit fed up with the hours of crying, and I am reliant on evenings to get some work done...any ideas? thanks

I should say that she is basically a pretty easy going baby, other than this evening thing

Try a swing? Worked for my guy. Also, we started a bedtime routine early and after the first few nights he started going to bed easily and with zero tears.

Oh it's hard isn't it.. hmm I remember walking up and down the hall for about 3hrs each evening...

I agree with the swing
Also swaddling and a white noise CD (mine liked the tumble dryer)

Good luck

Sounds like she is trying to build up your supply which drops off in the evenings, so that she can cluster feed. To help her and speed up your supply, offer her a few more feeds in the day. If all she does is suck twice each time it will help.

Can you sit on the sofa from 5-9 and just hold her/feed etc.?

Mine did this too. We gave a dummy and it worked for us. He waspnted to suck but kept getting annoyed that he was getting milk ( I know this because he wasn't swallowing the milk, just letting it run out of his mouth) we started a bedtime routine at 7 weeks as well which helped. Other than that, the phrase this too shall pass, was a mantra!

Are you me?!

DD is 7 weeks and screams - but not every evening. Usually if she's had a "busy" day and not napped well.

I haven't found an answer but noticing that if she sleeps from 3/3.30 til 5 ish she's happier although a bit grumpy. At the moment, she will fall asleep if I go into the bedroom, lights off and stick on white noise. However she still wants to feed shed loads until 9/10pm and I can't put her down.

I'm also going to try bedtime routine this weekend as I'm a bit bored of it now and miss DS (dh does his bedtime). Got to be worth a try.

yes, she tends to do a long sleep in the afternoon - although she is fed pretty much on demand - so at least every 2 hours or so...I think a routine would be good, and like iggly it's worse if she's had a busy day; likewise, my DP misses dd1's bedtime. I know it will pass, and she is mostly easy - just sometimes an hour off would be nice! more frequent feeds probably a good idea too.

She is growing and gaining very well - thriving, as they say