Only sleeps if fed with bottle, even if breastmilk?

[OctoberNovember]

My 6 week old is mainly breastfed, however has 2 bottles at night, one of expressed breast milk and one formula (early issues mean I'm still working on getting my supply up to 100%).

She has the expressed breastmilk around 7/7.30pm, stays awake for a while and then falls asleep around 8/8.30pm. We put her into her sleepyhead and she can sleep for 4.5 hours on a good night.

When she wakes up she has the bottle of formula and will fall asleep slightly quicker. Despite having the same amount (approx 130mls) as the first feed, she only sleeps for around 2.5 hours. I express around 2am to get the most milk for the next days bottle for my husband to feed her.

Pretty much without fail she wakes up at 4am every day. I then breastfeed her, but from this point on it's a total battle to get her to sleep. If I'm luckily she will fall asleep around 5.30 but has never managed more than 40 minutes and it's usually closer to 20, which is generally all she does for her daytime naps too (also a huge battle all day!)

I know she's not getting enough sleep across each 24 hours. Does anybody have any advice?

My main questions I suppose are:

• is her sleeping well a result of being fed from a bottle (so getting milk quicker?) or just chance that she sleeps well the only two times she has a bottle each day?

• is there anything I can do to get her to sleep again after the 4am feed? (The room stays pitch black, I don't stimulate her or change her unless totally necessary, I use white noise and a swaddle etc)

• will the second sleep get longer as she grows, so is this just an age thing or could there be other issues causing such an early wake up?

She is tiny still and their sleep often has no pattern still at this stage. Nothing to worry about. Just feed feed feed.

Also, babies tend to do one long stretch of sleep. So she might sleep 5-6 hours in one go. Regardless of what time this is, many consider this 'sleeping through the night'. After this long stretch of sleep they will have shorter bursts of sleep x

I think you are focusing on the wrong thing here OctoberNovember

This is primarily a feeding issue not a sleeping issue. You can't realistically expect to make any sense of baby's sleep until feeding is much more established.

I would take a "make the best of what we have" attitude towards sleep while you sort out feeding.

Overnight breastfeeds are very important for increasing your supply. I would suggest if you are aiming for breastfeeding that your night feeds involve a breastfeed before and after the bottle every time. Ideally just the breast. It, you know what? It's ok just to move to formula and bottles. It might beat exhausting yourself with all the breast/bottles/expressing all of the time. Up to you, but either is fine. Definately focus on feeding though. Feed feed feed all of the time.