9 week old is an awful sleeper

[Lozzerelli23]

Please help somebody! My baby girl is 9 weeks old. She is a pretty horrendous sleeper day and night and I'm getting to the point where I'm so tired I can't function anymore.

After battling to rock her to sleep from about 6.30pm most nights she will finally go off about 8. She will then have her longest stretch of the night, anything between 4 and 8 hours (although the 8 hours only happened a few times, it's mainly 4!) she will then sleep in 2 - 3 hourly chunks until it reaches 4 am and then no matter what I do from then she just will not stay asleep for longer than 45 mins. She won't just go down in her cot either I have to get her back to sleep either by rocking or nursing and then when she goes in her cot she seems to wake right up again shortly after.

She doesn't get a massive amount of sleep during the day but I have been trying to get her to nap after about 1.5 hours of awake time as she gets really overtired then and it seems to be working and she seems a lot happier in the day. She probably gets between 3 and 5 hours of sleep during day but this hasn't made any difference to the night. I have to either rock her, put her in sling, take her out in car/pram though as she won't sleep in her cot during the day meaning that I can't then nap when she does!

She is exclusively breastfed although I have considered formula to see if she sleeps better but she won't take a bottle! So I can't even try that!

I'm exhausted and I really don't know how much more I can take!

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

She sounds like a great sleeper (much better then my breastfed 8 week old). I think part of your problem is that your baby's bedtime is just too early. Try settling her so that her longest stretch of sleep starts at the same time as yours. My baby takes several hours to fully settle for his night time sleep so we start the settling process at 8pm and he is usually asleep by 11pm and then sleeps until 3am which is his longest stretch. Getting four undisturbed hours is really vital to my sanity and physical state.

She sounds great to me! Isn't 6:30 though a bit early to start putting her to sleep? My DS is only now at 10 mo going to sleep at 7:30 pm. It used to be around 10 pm at around 2 mo. And the intervals of waking are OK I think from my experience (of one!). My 10 mo is only now sometimes sleeping through the whole night (maybe once a week if we are lucky).

I would also put her to sleep much later. At 9weeks mine roughly fell asleep at 9pm in living room, we woke and dream fed at 11pm, and only then took them to bed with us

6.30pm is really early as a baby that age isn't going to sleep through the night from 6.30pm until morning. I would try and get a 45 min nap at 5-6pm, then ready for bed for 9pm instead. Semi wake and dream feed when you go to bed after.

Then if she occasionally sleeps 8hrs it will be 11pm-7am which is perfect, rather than 6.30pm to 2.30am

You've had some fantastic replies and advice already. I just wanted to say my 'turning point' was when I realised, when talking about babies & sleep, people lie. A lot.
I've no idea why it happens but it does. Yeah some babies sleep all night from an early age but most don't and once I realised I wasn't doing something wrong because my baby didn't the whole thing got a lot easier.

Agree with others that she is a brilliant sleeper! At that age mine would point blank refuse sleep until 1am and would then feed every 1.5-2 hours.

It is bloody exhausting though and, like you, I kept reading about babies who slept all night and felt so envious.

Mine just very suddenly started sleeping through at about 12 weeks ish. 19 weeks now and sleeps 8.30pm to 9.30am every night.... Just waiting for the dreaded regression to appear!

The only thing I have to add is that you can allow your sleep to be led by hers, it does make life a lot easier. If you know she does her biggest 'length' of sleep when you first put her down in the evening, go to bed at the same time as her. Because it's the unbroken stretch that really helps you recover, not snatching 30 minutes here and there.

I used to go to sleep when DD did (about 8pm), dream feed her in bed at about midnight when DH came up, then she'd wake between 4/5 for feeding and then be off and on again until about 7 - at which point she'd have another decent length nap, which I would join her in. We'd often not get up until around 10-11ish, but it was fine because it meant I was getting enough sleep to function.

Sounds like she's sleeping pretty well at night! You may need to go to bed earlier so you can be asleep by 10pm at latest so the broken sleep after 4am isn't too hard.

If this is your only child then you are hopefully luckily enough to be able to snooze during one of her naps if you're still tired.

Thanks for everyone's replies they have helped a great deal. I have tried making her bedtime later before but she is just miserable from about 6.30 hence why we started to settle her then, but what I may do is see if she will nap then and then push her actual bedtime back a bit and see how it goes.

I never knew being a mum would be so hard, hopefully I'll get used the the sleep or lack of it soon!

She is currently napping in her sling while I do a bit of housework, so at least she is getting some shut eye even if I'm not! She also had a short 30 min nap in her cot this morning which isn't great but it's a start!

You've had loads of great advice. Also, the "awake for 1.5 hrs during the day" thing I found to be brilliant at this age, so we'll done for following that. It may even be less than 1.5hrs at that age.

The only other thing I would add is that you could try bringing her into bed with you after her early morning feed (4am?) then the subsequent 45 min wakings will be easier to bear! Google safe co-sleeping.

When will I start feeling human again?!
Round about 2040. Just on time for grandchildren. Then you can be the sage old granny who comes in, nods, holds the baby for a few hours while the poor mama sleeps...