My 4 month old has always seemed to need a fraction of the amount of sleep she's 'supposed' to. As a newborn she could go hours and hours without sleeping and as she's our first it took us ages to realise it wasn't normal and we needed to help her nap.
At her age, she's supposed to sleep 14-16 hours a day, everything I read says she shouldn't be awake more than 2 hours at a time. But including everything- every ten min she dozes off at the boob, every hard fought nap- she's averaging 6-7 hours total in a 24 hour period.
She can go six hours without a nap, though that's rarer now. She'll only nap being walked in the pram, usually for exactly 30 min though I sometimes get an hour. So I generally get three pram naps and often one early evening where she feeds to sleep - about 2 hours in the day.
At night she'll do longer stretches but for the past week we've had two short sleeps of 45 min/1 hour between bedtime and midnight, then awake till 3 or 4am, then if I'm lucky a 3 hour sleep then up for the day.
I'm in pieces. I'm worried by how little sleep she's getting. She'll feed to sleep but instantly wake if transferred to side sleeper. The one hour sleeps before midnight only happen on my husband but he has to work so goes off duty at midnight. Her three hour sleep, if it happens, is generally after I've fed her to sleep and transferred her across a million times but for some reason it takes.
What can I do? Some nights it's better, she is capable of sleeping for five hours. Some nights it's worse and the total is three individual one hour naps over 12 hours.
Would love to hear if anyone has experienced similar and advice- I haven't come across any other babies with such low sleep totals. I feel I've tried everything and nothing has worked but we can't go on like this.