Desperately need advice :(

[Emmylou4004]

Hello! This is my first thread so a little unsure if I have the right section but I'm so desperate for some advice from other mums :(
My little girl is now 14 weeks - she's always been very alert & suffered in the past from bad colic/reflux - as a first time mummy I've found it so hard. She definitely seems to be doing better with this though. I absolutely love her to pieces but without structure or routine I feel lost, something that is hard with a baby!
Around the 8 week mark, she started to get a little better and I managed to get her settled into some form of routine - bath, bottle & bed at around 6:30pm (she's always knackered by then!) nap for an hour in the morning and 2 hours in the early afternoon. She'd wake once in the night for a bottle around 2am and then back to sleep! All seemed to be going well! But then she hit 11 weeks and since then she's been crying on the bottle & sometimes just playing with it (I have tried changing her milk & teat in case that was the problem but nothing has improved) - she also now wakes at 10:30 for a feed, then at 12:30, then 2am, then 3:45am then 5am and then finally fully awake at 6:30am. It's been like this for just over 3 weeks now and I'm exhausted. And it's like clockwork, the same time she wakes up every night. I've tried letting her cry it out, I've tried not feeding, I've tried baby massage, I've tried swaddling - nothing is working! Me and my partner are so tired that we are now taking it out on each other which just makes everything worse. I'd love to catch up on the sleep in the day when she naps but it's no good, no matter how hard I try to sleep when she does I just can't get to sleep. I'm at the point where I'm wondering if a sleep programme such as 'little ones' would work but then I wanted to see if it's just a phase if any other mums have experienced it at this point? Whenever she gets a little tired or drowsy I always put her down on her own so I know she can get to sleep without me there - I like the idea of her having a dummy in to reduce SIDS so I'm a little reluctant to try without (plus that seems to settle her the quickest!)
Any tips? I really feel like I'm going insane with the sleep deprivation :'(

Hi mama. First of all the baby is quite tiny for you to be leaving her to cry. Secondly, I don't think this is what you'll want to hear but baby sleep changes so much in the first year. They hit regressions and have growth spurts and all sorts. I really think it would help you if you could adjust your exoectetions of baby sleep. It won't be forever. My little one is 7 months and still wakes between 2-5 times a night. If baby is bottle fed can you take turns? Can you go to bed earlier to get more rest? It's still very early to expect a baby to sleep through without wake ups.

You poor thing, that sounds really hard.

Unfortunately there are lots of developmental leaps ahead in the first year so once you think you've nailed it, their sleep goes backwards and regresses again. It is so tough. In answer to your question, it is common for their sleep to regress at 3-4 months as they go through the 4 month sleep regression so you are not alone in what you are experiencing.

If you want her to sleep independently, putting her down when drowsy with a dummy is a great move. If she takes a dummy and it settles her, that is also brilliant (I really wish my one hadn't refused every single dummy that exists!).

When you list the different things you've tried, how long have you tried them for? For any change to make a difference, you need to try it consistently for every sleep for a few days for baby to start to associate it with sleep.

She is also very young to be left to cry, barely out of 4th trimester so she seeks all her comfort from her parents at the moment. From personal experience, I know too well that some babies will resist sleep and cry before going to sleep in an attempt to avoid but I wouldn't leave her to cry alone at this young age.

My advice at this stage would be to be consistent in how you handle night wake ups and develop some coping strategies on dealing with the wake ups such as taking it in turns to deal with them or your partner dealing with all wake ups for an entire night once each week so you get some uninterrupted sleep in another room. Even if you don't manage to fall asleep during the day, lie down and relax in a dark room as you will feel better for having had some rest.

It will pass and when older, you can consider sleep training if you really can't deal with the sleep deprivation

Is she waking for a feed at those times or just waking and being soothed back to sleep? And is she taking a full bottle when you say she's crying on it? Just wondering if she's getting a lot of wind and then not taking the whole bottle and waking up hungry.
It could be a developmental leap, have a look at wonder weeks as it's quite accurate for when babies are more fussy than other times.

The learning curve in these early months with your first child are steep, to say the least Emmylou4004. I think I did the most learning in the first 12 months with my first child than I've ever done - and I have a life which revolves around continual learning. 14 weeks in is very early, it's not surprising you feel overwhelmed. I think the majority of new mums do.

Letting baby cry isn't the answer.

Baby has a need at night and your only requirement as a parent is to figure out what the need is and meet the need. I say "only" like it's easy - it absolutely is not easy!

The most obvious reason for baby to cry is hunger. If baby will feed and is settled after a feed, that was the reason. Never deny a hungry baby a feed (that's the central premise behind on-demand feeding).

But there are ways you can encourage less night feeds. Primarily this involves 'calorie loading' - so try and get as many calories into baby through the day, so less is needed at night. This usually involves more frequent bottles (so feeds closer together) rather than bigger feeds. You should always offer more milk that baby will drink in the bottle, so offering more makes no difference. Instead try re-offering the bottle after winding to see if more is taken. And offer feeds more often so there are more bottles per day. I used to feed every 2h-2h30m from 7pm-11pm. Around 8 full feeds per day during the daytime.

Another way to discourage night wakes is to have an alternate method to settle baby that isn't feeding. The simplest and easiest option for this is the dummy.

But alternate settling methods don't mean refusing a feed. The idea would be that you try for maybe 10-15 minutes to settle baby (preferably in the cot) with the dummy. If it works, great. If it doesn't then feed. But the more you do it, the more baby will get used to being settled independently.

In terms of your daytime, sounds like baby needs more frequent daytime naps. I would suggest trying to get baby back to sleep after 90 minutes awake, unless baby gets grumpy earlier than this.