Helping baby to sleep- 5 month old

[Katherz08]

Hi

After some advice on settling my ds3 just turned 5 months old. He is very difficult to settle on a night- usually still awake after 10.30 at night. He is breast fed and will often fall asleep on the breast but if I put him down he wakes up and we start all over again. He has no sleep routine during the day and can fall asleep any time from 9 in the morning to 2pm in the afternoon. I am looking for some help in getting him into a good routine please.

To clarify I know the importance of routine- my othet 2 children have great bedtime routine of bath, story cuddles and in bed by 8. they also had good routines and regular naps as babies but have tried to get my little one to do the sane and to go down by himself- results in screaming and screaming until I pick him up again, daytime routine really difficult cos have to drop my other 2 boys off at school and he will quite often fall asleep in the car. He seems to do 20min power naps and then wake up again.

Aside from this won't take a bottle (expressed breast milk) from anyone else but me- had to leave him with my mam while I had a job interview for a different job after maternity leave and he refused to take it, also refuses to be put down for more than a few mins at a time- very difficult when I have 2 other children. I need to sort out better routine for us both because clearly carrying him round pretty much all day and not having time at night for housework etc when my other 2 boys in bed cannot continue.

I know I have taught him this behaviour- just wondering how best to teach him a way without unnecessary upset to either of us

Thanks for any help x

No advice sorry as I've come on here with a similar problem. Its blinkin hard! Interested to see what people say re: how to break the feeding to sleep habit

Oh well BettyBi0 at least we are in the same boat :-)
I love breastfeeding- have fed all 3 of my children but its difficult when they use you to fall asleep isn't it

Well small victories- he was nodding off while sitting on my lap so I put him upstairs in his crib with the baby monitor on and he fell asleep in about 5 mins- been asleep for 25 mins so far so that's pretty good for him

I can't comment on the boob thing as DS2 (6mo) is now bottle fed and doesn't feed to sleep but we've gone from no pattern to naps to textbook naps in he last couple of weeks (the nights have not got correspondingly better).

I did this by slowly edging him to the "correct" times. Watching for signs very carefully and moving naps slowly around. We started by putting him in the sling or walking him in the pram to "force" the naps but obviously you can only work that when they're tired. It has taken four weeks of forcing and edging naps around to get our textbook daytime naps.

It is nice to be fairly sure he will nap and know roughly how long a break I will get but as I said our dreadful nights are no better... Worse actually! But with DS1 once daytime naps were in the right place we suddenly had a very easy time at nights so it is worth getting slowly towards a shape in the daytime.

There is a fairly major development milestone at 5-6 months that allows babies to understand how little they are in relation to everything else and how little control they have over it. It tends to make them very clingy and there is obviously also the famous 5 month sleep regression.

With DD (now 5.5 months) we're just co-sleeping and following her signs re when she needs a nap or food until she gets through it. It doesn't last forever, we're slowly seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!

I didn't realise 5 months was a major sleep regression time. Maybe I should delay trying to fix anything.... Or maybe it will just make the sleep regression worse. Bum...

I'm of the opinion of give it a go- if I wait another month the behaviour is only going to be more ingrained.

Babies don't really form hard to break habits - they can learn new routines within a week.