please help me before I go mad - newborn awake from 9pm unti 2am every night & I don't know what to do.

[bodenbetty]

I wish I knew how to hrl pher & get her setteld but I don't seem able to do it & Its horrible. In teh day she feeds fine & goes to slepp in her cot no probelms. At night when i've fed her she lies in her cot, her legs & arms go mad & she's squealing & grunting. I thought it couldbe wind but even after winding her ( a feat in itslef) she still lies there & kicks. I'm giving her infacol but it doesn't seem to be having any efect.tehn she seesm to want to go on & off me very 5 minutes. falls asleep on me then wakes after 5 minutes & screams again. she is in our room & right next to me. i don't feel comfortbale with her slepping in bed with us. I thingk she falls asleep in teh end out of exhaustion.
Somone told me fennel tea was good fro settling babaies but no joy with that yet.
I'm so tired that I coould cry _ I just want her to not cry & be settled & I feel I'm failing her becasue I don'r know whats wrong or how to deal with it. All her cries sound teh same to me.

i was going to ring my HV but don't hvae much faith inher as she told me her mouth was full of milk resideue then teh Dr at the 10 day check said it was thrush.
if anyone has experienced teh same thing or any ideas how I can stop this awful circle I;d be so grateful.

Re gap between bedside cot and bed, put sheet lengthways across both cot and bed to get rid of gap.

I loved my bedside cot, all the pleasure of co-sleeping, no worries about falling/squashing, and loads of room for everyone (including dh). OK, so a couple of times I ended up sleeping in the cot, but hey, nothing's perfect!

Betty just wanted to say this is normal for some babies. I didn't realise I had 2 arms for months as dd would not settle anywhere except in someone's arms. I was up every 2 hours for first 12 weeks, and first 5 hour stretch was after a few months. I'd recommend sling for daytime and bedside cot for night. I had a marvellous mw in hospital who gave me loads of WHO information of safely sleeping with your baby. She was the only one - the others all tutted!

Other option is everyone on the floor on a mattress if you're worried about falling.

My problem the other way around, Ok to go to sleep then from 2am screaming and fussing waking me up. Osteopath said (see how desperate I was!) that if she's feeding for a long time the wind will slip into the intestine i.e. wait till it comes out the bottom. I find that once I start messing around trying to wind her it gets worse and worse, leave her alone for a while to try to shift it herself. Infacol helped me a bit but the turning point seems to be a top up of formula (whispered!), breast feed last thing then as little movement as possible into the cot, keep them in the same position as much as possible. She now goes through the 2 am to dawn nightmare of feed, wind, get a wind, hungry again, change nappy, feed, wind cycle which almost killed me.

Becs31, (Hijack sorry)your situation sounds like CSWS on the Feb06 thread contact her, as her baby has been diagnosed with food intollerences via the breast milk and silent reflux from what I remember, hth's

hello betty,
how did it go last night? did anyone get any sleep?

i just wanted to say that your baby is keeping very similar hours to my dd and we just had to go with it. we all went to sleep at 2, then it just dialled itself back to 1, then 12, then by some miracle she just jumped into a pattern of sleeping 7 til 7. all done and dusted within about 6-8 weeks.

the thing is that when she was tiny she wasn't a huge crier (well, if we put her down into her bed at 7pm she was) so we were quite content to keep her with us in a sling or on a lap or shoulder while we pootered abou in the evenings. i appreciate that would be difficult if you have other children to take care of, however.

DH and i would then go into the bedroom and watch a dvd from about 12pm, so we were getting some kind of rest, while the baby was in between us in the bed. we watched A LOT of Curb Your Enthusiasm, as i recall...

i know you are not keen to do co-sleeping but we found that if we laid the baby on a large towel folded in half and rolled the sides up to make a bolster for her (IYKWIM?) then she was quite happy to lie there feeding, gurgling and only occasionally complaining while we watched our DVD. (of course she bloody was, she had both of her parents lying beside her attending to her every whim...)

anyway, by the end of the dvd she would generally have dropped off and we would transfer her out of our bed and into hers. (she had a hammock, by the way, it's something to think about if your situation doesn't resolve itself).

i too had been concerned about co-sleeping but seeing her contained in her bolster and watching her for the couple of hours every night soon convinced me that she was safe, so it meant that i was more confident about bringing her in with us during the night if she woke up. she couldn't get out from her bolster until she was about 6months old.

also (sorry this is so epic) i read in an NCT mag that reasearch has found that breastfeeding mothers naturally make a protective C curve around their babies while they sleep, so no-one can roll onto them. i was mix feeding at the time, and i know i did it. (Having said that, i'm actually certain that FF mothers would do the same, it's completely innate in us to want to protect our babies, but the research was most likely done on BFers alone).

anyway, i do hope that things settle down soon. best wishes, and congratulations on your new baby.

thanks aitch. Last night was marginally beter though I can't rememerb how many times she woke I know that she woke at one point, I tried to feed her, she wasn't interested & went back to sleep almost staright away!!!
my lovely HV has beenout this morning & said basically that I was probaly overstimulating her in my efforts to get her to go to sleep & that if I left her to her own devices abit more she might drop off on her own ......& doyou know what she has! also that as her weight gian is fine I don't ned to feed her every single time she squawks & I can let her go 2 hours from when she last finished a feed before worrying about teh next one. so she finshed feding at 11 so don't to wory for abit longer. though to be honest i 'm tempted just to let her sleep.
this is all probably bleeding obvious to most of you but feels like a real revelation to me!

well that sounds like good news to me, marginally better is a good start.
that sounds like good advice from the HV, lucky you to have one who knows what she is doing,
good luck for later.

Glad you had a better night bodenbetty

sorry for posting my message here, i am not sure of the online protocol and i didn't mean to stop messages to Betty. I am just too tired to get things right.

oh don't be daft, becs, it's absolutely fine, you've not done a thing wrong.
i'll tell you what though, i personally find it hard to keep track when two people are posting about slightly different things on the one thread, so i tend to concentrate on the original poster.
why don't you start a new conversation and re-post your question? (it took me ages to find out how to do this, you would go into the 'sleep' section and then at the top of the page, but under the bit where it says add a post, add to watch etc, it says something like 'to create a new conversations post here'. the 'here' is in blue.)
I'll have a look for you and answer so your post won't be too lonely, but in truth i didn't really have much of a crying bub so all i can offer is my sympathy... it's hard enough with sleep, never mind none.
anyway, re-post if you can and i'll come and get you,
take it easy,
h

becs - no problem at all I know just how you feel! do like aicth said & you might get more replies geared towards what you are going through. i always draw great strength from teh fact that whatever ipo st someone else has always gone through it before - & lived through it too. I hope things improve for you soon as well. take care BB