5 month woes

[bassackwards]

Grateful for any words of wisdom or solidarity. My 6 m.o. wakes frequently at night and can only be settled by nursing (EBF). This has always been our routine but now the wakings are every 1.5-2 hours (!) and I'm getting badly worn out. It's been going on like this for a couple of months.

Is it possible for baby to be hungry every 2 hours at night or is this just a comfort/association thing do you think?

Also, everything I read says to avoid feeding to sleep so I worry that what I'm doing is 'bad' even though it's the only thing that seems to work. I guess my worry is that baby isn't learning to self soothe and remains highly dependent on me all night long. Is this something I should be trying to correct or is this just a normal thing at this age? I want to give her comfort and support, but also the skills she needs to sleep independently one day. Man it's hard isn't it??

Seems pretty normal to me, breast fed babies do not feed the same as formula fed babies.
So their routine of waking up/feeding will change as they go through growth spurts. They need to feed more to stimulate the breasts to make more milk. Frequent feeding at night is usual as your body naturally makes more milk during this time.
5 months is quite a biggie in terms of growth spurts, so hang on in there!
I Found once my babies got to weaning stage they slept a lot longer at night. Bottle fed babies tend to sleep longer at night with less wakings as the formula is heavier and takes longer to digest so they feel full for longer. Some people are just lucky too, I wouldn’t compare your babies waking/feeding with anyone else’s as every baby is different.
Hope this helps, keep yourself as rested as you can for now.

My 6mo is the same waking every 1-2hrs and I breastfeed her to sleep. She has some formula and solids in the day and I think at night she breastfeeds mostly for comfort as she can't settle by herself. But I feed her as it means I don't have to rock her to sleep! Still v tiring though. I'm hoping to try some form of sleep training soon so that she isn't needing me to feed her all the time but I need to gather the energy for it!

I am happily feeding my 9mo back to sleep when needed through the night. This might be comfort, might be actual hunger, but whichever is fine for me, BF is not just about food.

He can settle himself between sleep cycles if he needs to so if he wakes, I feed him, as frankly, that's autopilot now

I'm not going to night wean any time soon, he's a big baby and not eating enough solids yet.

I've just posted about my worry at BFing to sleep, so I don't feel I've got it "right", but something did recently help me when it came to having the same question re night feedings as you...

I was advised on a 10/60 "rule". I made it 5/60 due to my son's disposition (ie he's not really a "crier")

So it means that when ds wakes at night, as long as his cry isn't distressed (because normal for him is a tear free shout), I'll leave him for 5 mins before feeding him. In doing this, at least half the time he will fall back to sleep within a minute or less.

If he wakes again in less than an hour, I'll feed him straight away, otherwise I'll give it a 5 minute wait again... And so on

I feel that this helped me to tease out when he was truly hungry and when he just wanted a little reassurance. It gave him the chance to show me, rather than me shoving boob immediately into mouth! after the second night doing this he slept from 7-7, waking only for feeds at 1 and 4.

Of course we also still have "bad" nights, but nice to know there are some good ones in between, and we're not getting into a long term habit of feeding every 90 mins

Sounds like I'm not alone

Muse84 I'm glad to hear you've found a strategy that's working well for you. I do that sorta thing with mine too although I don't think she's ever succeeded in getting herself back to sleep on her own. I'm sure we'll get there one day! She's fast asleep on my lap right now having finished nighttime feed #1. Let the games begin (again)!