14wo sleep issues - help!

[Cathster]

First time poster here but been lurking on Mumsnet since I became pregnant and seen the brilliant advice that posters get here so was wondering for some help myself. At my wits end now and not sure how to cope with another night like this!

My DD is almost 14 weeks and the past week her sleep has just gone to complete pot. We had three amazing nights where she slept for 9 hours straight for the first time ever and now all of a sudden she has started waking every 45 minutes!! She is not hungry, and as soon as we pick her up she settles and goes back to sleep. Sometimes she's not even awake, just crying at the 45 minute mark so the end of her sleep cycle.

We've tried just putting the dummy back in which sometimes is enough to send her off but only for another 45 minutes. Shushing and patting does nothing whatsoever. She flails like a mad thing as well, punching and kicking the mattress in her sleep.

She's not great at napping during the day and has been even worse over the Xmas period, getting about 30 mins every four hours, so we thought that it was overtiredness, but she had two 2+ hour naps today and it's still happening so I'm at a complete loss! Could it be the time she is going to bed, as she didn't do this the night before last when we put her to bed at 6pm? We tried putting her to bed at 6pm tonight and she had a 45 minute sleep then wanted to play then feed so didn't go down properly until 10pm. She then woke at 11 briefly, back down at 11:30 and up again 15 minutes later. OH is in there now trying to get her to sleep as she's now wide awake and I'm here tearing my hair out!

Any advice would be well received, I'm dreading another sleepless night!

Daytime sleep and daytime feeds will be the issue.

about 30 mins every four hours, so we thought that it was overtiredness, but she had two 2+ hour naps today and it's still happening so I'm at a complete loss!

30 mins sleep in 4 hours is nowhere near enough. Two 2 hour naps is great, but (a) a one-off will make little or no different, it needs to be consistent to see an effect. (b) two sleeps a day suggest long awake times between naps

It's not length of nap you want to pay attention to. It is awake time between naps. At 14 weeks awake time wants to be around 1h to 1h20m ish. Depending how long it takes you to get baby to sleep, that might mean baby wakes, is fed, nappy change (all takes, say, 30 minutes) then if it takes up to half an hour to get baby back to sleep it might mean just 10-15 minutes awake happy time before trying to get baby back to sleep.

I favour EASY to ensure regular feeds and naps through the daytime. I'd recommend about a 2h-2.5h EASY cycle at this age.

E - eat, full feed
A - awake time (60-80 mins from waking)
S - sleep (short naps of 20-45 mins normal at this age)
Y - you time while baby sleep.

Very frequent daytime feeds are often better than bigger less frequent feeds for 'calorie loading' during the day do that baby is less hungry at night.

Also frequent daytime sleeps to tackle overtiredness helps baby settle to sleep more easily and ensures a more settled and deeper sleep at night.

In terms of night wake ups, I have the 5 mins rule and the 30 minute rule.

If baby wakes I give dummy. If baby is not back to sleep within 5 mins then I will assume 'dummy wont do' and feed.

If baby does go back to sleep with dummy but then wakes again within 30 mins, I take that again as 'dummy won't do' and do feed.

Being very free and and frequent with feeds helps longer term because while the feed may take some of your sleep time, across the whole evening it allows for a more settled night just to crack on a d give the feed.

Google 4 month sleep regression...

Thank you so much for your advice Fate, that is really useful. We took it on board yesterday and it was so easy to get her down for naps (including one in her cot which is unheard of!) They were mostly 20-40 minute naps apart from an hour one in the evening which before we would have been fighting to push for longer, but she was happy and never awake more than 1.5hr, sometimes less if her nap had been quite short.

Just doing a night feed now after she went down to bed at 8.30 and slept through til 1.50, only waking once for dummy!

She did actually end up putting herself back on 3hrly feeding yesterday (usually 4hrs) but on one occasion only took a very small amount as I misjudged her wanting a bottle. Just wondering how I can get the EASY routine to work if a) her sleep time is sometimes only 20 minutes so would have been less than 2 hours since last feed and b) she's obviously not hungry upon waking?

PotteringAlong I did wonder if she had hit the four month sleep regression early, but she does have a corrected age of eight weeks so didn't think it was that?