Self soothing

[Bose1]

Hello, my little one is 9 weeks and I am exclusively breastfeeding. I'm having difficulty getting her to stay asleep for longer than 15 mins unless she is on me. This means she sleeps with us in bed which I would really like to stop. Any tips? We tried for 4 hours last night before she finally went down. Do I just have to accept that my baby is the type who likes to sleep on mum?

I have an 8wo and although is fine at night for some reason same problem for day naps. We found she was happier if the Moses basket had rolled up towels round the edge to make her feel cosier, imitated laying on someone.

You can buy a cocoonababy for safe nights. Just this week started by putting her down when vv fast asleep and rocking if she stirred, and quite quickly Able to move towards her being more aware and less bothered. Hth

9 weeks is still really tiny, in the grand scheme of things. Perfectly normal for her to only want to sleep on you (and who could blame her!). DD was the same, so we got a side-car crib thingie (best nest rented from NCT for £100). We worked slowly from having her sleep on one of us at night to me slowly scooting her over to the crib after each night feed (at which she'd fall asleep on boob). Tricks like swaddling and making the crib mattress warm (with a hot water bottle - obviously remove before inserting baby) helped.

Or you could just go with the co-sleeping thing and set things up so that's safe and comfortable for all of you. I did this during the worst moments of DD's hideous 3-month long sleep regression, where the only means of survival was co-sleeping and learning to feed lying down. For naps at that age DD exclusively took them either in the sling or on me after a feed. She point blank refused to go in the pram until she was 3 months old...

DD didn't learn to self-settle until she was around 6 months old. Prior to that I always fed her to sleep at night (and rocked her to sleep for naps) and transferred her to the crib asleep. I think a 9 wk old that can self-soothe is a rare thing.

Just to give you hope - she was napping in her cot by about 5 months, self-soothing at night by 6 months and sleeping through (7-7) by 8.5 months. If someone had told me that when she was 9 weeks old I would have laughed maniacally before making the most of all those little baby snuggly sleeps.

Thank you both for your post - some great advice/ tips

personally I'd go with it and look at safe cosleeping info. isis online is excellent. a friend had this and moved lo on into a sleepyhead which worked well.

for my ds it was an issue of being flat ie he couldn't be horizontal till about 10 mo

feeding lying down is great - just double check latch and chin is touching boob .