what time does your newborn go down for the night?

[curlyLJ]

Since she was born, we've been taking DD2 (nearly 7 weeks) up with us when we go to bed - she did start to fall asleep on me about 10.30/11ish from about 5 weeks old and would sometimes happily transfer to the moses basket and sleep for anywhere between 2.5-4.5 hrs, other times I had to re-feed to sleep. She would then feed once or twice in the night depending on the length of that first stretch.

This all went to pot a few days ago, so i thought maybe she wants to go earlier as she was starting to seem overtired. So, last night, I took her up to dark room for a feed and tried to get her down at 9. In the end DH got her settled about 9.40 but she seemed to treat this as a nap and was awake again by 10.30. Endless attempts to settle her failed (feed, rock, white noise etc) and we were both still awake at 2am! Bloody frustrating to say the least. A very restless night followed - she seemed very windy and pood twice - awake again at 4.15, then 5.45 until she finally went down at 7am until 10am . She then fed,got dressed etc and slept again from 11.15-1.15, obviously making up for it in the day.

It feels like everything's gone tits up and I don't know what to do now. I guess I should have got her up for the day by 7.30-8 regardless but I was shattered and needed some sleep! How do you get them down earlier at night? I cant remember how we did it with DD1. FH says keep her awake more in the day, but i disagree...

At 8 weeks we started a set bedtime routine starting at 7 of bath, massage, pjs / grobag, long feed and down by 8-8:30. It's worked a treat.

Before that we were free styling and he was often still awake at 10-11 which was killing me.

We do 3 naps a day. Sleep promotes sleep so definitely don't keep your LO join the day they will only get over tired.

My LO is 8 weeks and her routine now is bath at 6:30pm which she loves ready for bed then feed and upstairs into Moses basket with white noise (found this helped from week 1)at about 7:30pm she then wakes at about 1:30am for a feed then goes till 7:30am. She doesn't sleep much during the day and feeds every 3-4 hours x

thanks for the replies. mrsmugoo what time did he wake up when you started to out him to bed at 8-8.30, did he know it wasn't just naptime??

Klou we use white noise too, but this works better for naps than at night for some reason. Does (or did) your DD cluster feed - not sure if you're BF or not - but at the moment I could never get DD down as early as you as she wants to feed constantly in the evenings...

His first stretch of the night is anything from 2-5 hours he's very inconsistent.

He definitely knows it's night time as I can't put him down to sleep at all in the day, he takes all his naps on me and he's a catnapper

I don't think there's much point trying to do a fixed bedtime until they have finished the cluster feeding stage. With both my babies this was around 8 weeks, and then I started doing bedtime about 8/9ish (short routine of bath, milk, bed) and it gradually got a bit earlier. Now my 3 month old goes to bed at 7.30 with my 4 year old.

What is your baby's normal awake time during the day? Mine could only usually stay awake about an hour at 8 weeks, so once I'd decided on a bedtime I would wake them about an hour/90 minutes before that.

thanks fledermaus I think that is what I am going to have to do. DD had a late nap yesterday from 6pm-8pm and so by the time she finished cluster feeding, I didn't get her down until gone midnight!

She can manage to stay awake about an hour to 90 mins at the most at the moment and she just catnaps through the cluster feeding. I just couldn't remember how we managed it last time, but I think maybe around 8 weeks or so I think it calmed down.

Is it possible to try and 'enforce' the cluster feeding to start a bit earlier? If we could just guarantee getting her down by 10pm I would be happier. She seems to wake for a feed around 3.30/4 regardless of what time she goes down, so this would give me a bigger block of sleep

She also gets really windy, wriggly and grunts from about 5/6am,even though she is not really awake but it's a pain for me because I can't sleep through it.

My dd is nearly 8 months old and goes to bed at 730pm nightly. However I remember that age she too would cluster feed until around 1130pm then sleep.

At 11 weeks old i was knackered and decided to get a night time routine in order. This started with bath and then the cluster feeding would commence.

I think she outgrew the cluster feeding at about 13/14 weeks old.

Naps were the same too, short cat naps on my boob or on me in the daytime.

My dd has never been a great sleeper, but is finally getting better. The naps got longer at about 5 months old, she's now on 2 naps per day. And does 730pm-630/7am with a quick feed somewhere in the night.

They all get their eventually, however it's most frustrating and annoying when you just want them to go to bed earlier so you can regain your nights back, or actually take a shower when they have their morning nap.

What worked here was routine routine routine. My HV said babies thrive on routine and I've found this to be very accurate.

Good Luck

curlyLJ LO is formula fed and before I started the bath time routine she was very unsettled in the evenings so she would have 2 feeds closer together then go off around 9:30ish. I have also just started using infacol the last week as although she had no probs bringing up wind she had all the symptoms and since then seems to be a lot more settled in general! Also I found LO was becoming too reliant on white noise to go off to sleep during day so I just stopped it in the daytime altogether and she soon got used to it! Now I think she knows that when she goes upstairs into Moses basket with white noise on -it's bedtime! I also turn it on after 1:30am feed too x

Hehe DD also does the grunting thing when stirring in the morning but has recently just stopped this not sure if that's related to the infacol again or not?! X

Hope u get into a routine soon and lots of sleep x

Well last night was horrendous. Got DD to sleep relatively easily in her basket at 10.30pm, but she woke about 11.20 and from then until gone 3.30am she just wouldn't settle. Tried all the tricks but she was fighting me and squirming if i tried to rock her, wouldn't feed to sleep (even lying down feeding in my bed) and was just grizzling.
In the end i was close to losing it after a week of this, so at 3.15 I put her in her basket with white noise on loud and left her to it. She cried on and off (tired grizzly cry, not distressed) for about 20mins and then slept till 6.30am. Not proud of it and won't make a habit of it, but as I say I couldn't take anymore and this was the best/safest option for us both.

Grrr, all I want is one stretch of sleep for 3, maybe 4 hours from 11pm then i don't mind all this, but sleep deprivation sucks.
Managed to catch up on some sleep when she had her first 2hr nap but it's not the same...

Do you think she has wind curlyLJ? My little girl suffered with it (still does a little in fact) I tried everything. Infacol, gripe water, colief but I found biogaia probiotics the best for helping wind which resulted in squirming and awful colic from 3 weeks to 14 weeks old. I wish I had found them earlier tbh.

Sometimes just putting them down and walking away is the best option if you are at the end of your tether.

Sleep deprivation is a bloody killer, it's the worst torture in my book. It makes you feel so down lack of sleep. I know you hear this so much and I literally wanted to slap folk who said it to me but it does get better. Even the worst sleepers on my ante
Natal thread (my dd was in the
Non sleepers club) are all starting to sleep and settle better.
I promise you this will pass and get better.

Thanks mrsrolandrat, i thought I was going to get people telling me I shouldn't have let her cry! I was still in the room anyway for the most part, i just had to get away and breathe for 5 minutes. When i came back, she was going quiet on and off, so i decided to wait and see what happened.

Not sure about wind, I did try to wind her but she didn't seem that windy to be honest. She did do a poo of epic proportions this morning though, shortly after getting up, so maybe that was it. I will have a look into probiotics as we're just getting over thrush and I read somewhere else that these might help.

Yes it is a killer and even though you're more prepared for it second time round, it's still so, so hard.

Glad I found this thread, although not glad to hear someone is going through the same as me!

I have a DD who is 7 weeks today and I feel like i have no clue what I am doing. i've tried to install a routine (using the Baby Secrets book). All i have managed is the bath at around 7pm ish and putting DD in moses basket in quiet/dark room and she will sleep for anything between 1.5 hours and 2.5 hrs on her own in there. She usually then wakes up around 10pm/11pm and for the rest of the night is awake pretty much every hour for a tiny feed. It takes an hour each time to get her back down. When she does finally sleep, she gripes and cries throughout.

I thought it might be wind but she burps just fine. I have tried to give her cooled boiiled water, gripe juice and infacol but it hasn't made any difference to the griping. I was originally BFing but now FFing because i am anaemic and it was making me feel quite poorly.

I wondered if I've just completely confused her with the feeding thing and now she just doesn't know what she's meant to be doing and when. Or if she is just super constipated all the time. The pooping has gone from super runny and changing about 15 times a day to 1 to 3 nappies a day and it seems to be really hard work for her to poop now.

The most she'll ever eat is 60ml. The most she'll ever sleep is 2.5 hours. Everyone keeps telling me this is normal for a 7 week old and it will get better but I just don't feel like it's right. It can't be right for a baby to be squirming and grunting and crying and trying to poop all night can it?

Sorry if this seems a little scatty... am so tired.

The other thing is that because I feel like I've not had any sleep, I don't get up with DD until 10 or 11am which I feel really guilty about. It then takes me a few hours to get ready by which time most of the day is over (Certainly any mother and baby groups) so as of yet I haven't actually been anywhere other than the supermarket and I feel like we are both missing out. I just don't know how anyone does this!

I'm going to go back and read everyone's responses to the original post and see if there are any tips that might help!

CurlyLJ I feel your pain. The sleep deprivation is the thing that is affecting me the most. Like you, I just would like that run of 4 or 5 hours.. that would be amazing! Keep me updated if anything works for you

2.5 hours is really good for a 7 week old! Their tummies are so tiny they need feeding often. Not good for Mummies unfortunately. My EBF 12 week old still doesn't do 4-5 stretches with any regularity.

Mine used to graze all night until around midnight, then one night I got fed up about 8pm ish and stuck him in the sling so I could have a break - he fell asleep after 10 minutes or so and slept for three hours in the sling! After that I carried on using the sling but after a week or so he seemed to get the idea and started falling asleep earlier in the evening - it might have happened without the sling but it worked for me.

It's quite hard to remember even though ds is only 9mo but I'm pretty sure in his first 12weeks he generally slept 9pm-midnight-3am-6am-7:30am.
At around 5.5 mo when he went into his own room we started bath then 8pm bed which came forward after a bit to 7:30 and is now about 7:15.

For a wee while dh gave a bottle of expressed at midnight so I got to sleep 9pm to 3am - bliss!

Out twins age 3 months go up when we do around 11pm as they have to stay in same room until six months anyway. One twin skeps through until 6.30 the other twin it's fifty fifty whether she wakes for a feed but then sleeps until around 7.

My daughter cluster fed until 5 months (20 weeks) and went to bed anywhere from 9-11pm. One day she decided she wanted to go to sleep at 7pm and that was that. DS on the other hand has wanted a 6.30-7pm bedtime since birth, even when he was on the boob (he's been FF since 2 weeks because I was so badly anaemic).