5 week old (40+5 adjusted) stays awake for up to 5 hrs during day. Help

[HJ82]

My LO is a dream through the night but come 8-9am she's awake and wide eyed. I've tried soothing her and walking in pram etc but she gets overtired and won't sleep and then only stops screaming on boob. Pram walks help but I can leave the house at 9am and push her around between feeds all day!

Help!!

This is why you have maternity leave!! (And why you laugh at your pre-baby self who thought you’d have loads of time to do your own thing ‘while baby is sleeping’...) You do live your life around naps when they’re tinies, I’m afraid, but in the scheme of things it’s a really short time. When she’s 18 months old and trashing the house from dawn til dusk you’ll wish yourself back to Mumsnetting several times a day for a few hours under a comatose baby!

Personally I would try not to feed to sleep - this is just personal preference and there isn't a right/wrong way to do it, but I fed dc1 to sleep and found with subsequent babies that it worked better for me not to.

I would always feed them when they woke up. Then short awake time at this age and into the pram (or sling) for a nap after no more than an hour/90 minutes awake. Either go for a walk with the pram or just rock in the hallway. Then repeat - when they wake, feed, short awake time (nappy change), back to sleep.

It does feel like all you do with a newborn is feed them change them and get them to sleep but it's a short time in the grand scheme of things.

I found pram naps under about 9 months to be most convenient because they can sleep anywhere and you can get on with your day and go out. Plus if they start to stir you can rock them back to sleep with a foot.
Once they're down to 2 naps a day then morning out in the pram, afternoon in the cot.

What @ElphabaTheGreen said. Self soothing is a developmental milestone. Babies can't do it until they are developmentally ready to do so. You can't 'train' a baby to self soothe and feeding to sleep can't train them to never 'self soothe'. My first always fed to sleep (I could never work out how you'd not do that, if she went on the boob she fell asleep!) and she was a great sleeper from 10 months and from a year in her own room when we dropped feeding to sleep. never had a problem.

My now 3 week old has a noisy 3 year old to contend with when trying to sleep so we don't have the luxury of anything but whacking him on the boob so he sleeps as silence and quiet is not a thing for him!

@Preggosaurus9 this is what I said to the neonatal nurse! She suggested books and stimuli 😬 I've cut that. If she is awake and looking around I'll show her a picture or two but that's it! We've had a few visitors too and she won't sleep when people are here so I need to cut that for a bit. She's really only a 6 days old if we take out the born at 35weeks part! Although she already has good control of her head and worms around on her tummy and pushes off my lap with her legs and rolls over to one side from back. (That's probably all normal at 5 weeks though) she does seem very strong

@AbbyHammond this is what we have been doing but she won't go to sleep after activity. So today I've put her back on boob and she's nodded off then I've transferred her to cot. Although she's been sleeping for 3.5 hrs now so I'm inclined to wake her. Haha. Oh dear! Maybe she's catching up!! To find a happy medium.

Have you tried giving her a dummy to suck to sleep?

I wouldn't let mine go more than 3 hours between feeds in the day as didn't want them making up for it at night.

@AbbyHammond she spits them out

Sounds like you are doing brilliantly and yes I bet she is catching up on some missed zzzs. Neonatal nurse is just wrong, babies of 6 days corrected do not need tummy time or books they need feeding and sleeping and cuddles and that’s about it. As a pp said there isn’t time for much more, it’s wake feed burp change back to sleep! Save the books and tummy time for another month, gradually she will need a little more awake and less asleep time.

@minipie yeah agree. I'm trying feed/sleep/feed but she just wants to be awake. We were doing so well all morning. But now been awake 2.5hrs. Napped all morning - was bliss. 😔

@ElphabaTheGreen spoke too soon. Awake since 2pm. Naps on boob about 10mins only. Pram failed. Back to boob. Tbh I'm getting frustrated with my boob being used this way. It's uncomfortable and irritating 😖😖 what do people who have bottle fed babies do to soothe I wonder 🤷🏼‍♀️

Bottle fed babies are soothed with dummies usually OP. Have you got a good feeding pillow to help make you more comfortable?

Remember - dummies are a substitute for a boob, not the other way around. Your boob is supposed to be pacifier, comforter, reassurance. A bottle is purely for feeding. A breast is not. Once you can make peace with the idea that breastfeeding is a very great deal more than calories, you can make peace with your boob being used ‘this way’ (ie entirely in the way it’s supposed to be used). I fought it with my first but ‘got it’ with my second and had a much easier mat leave second time around, plus DS2 became my better sleeper in the longer term, I’m sure because I supported him properly before he was developmentally ready to sleep independently.

Also - sleep is a roller coaster for the first two to three years, not a steady trajectory of longer and longer stretches of sleep until you reach a magic 12 hours at night and two or three predictable naps during the day. It changes constantly, especially when teething starts so you’re far safer being prepared for constant change then falling into the trap where you either think you’ve ‘cracked it’ after two good days or, worse, think you’ve ‘failed’ because you’re having a hell week.

Also - when you say she slept for 10 mins only, did you try another transfer to a cot/pram? If so, it was the transfer that woke her. Keep holding and she’d probably stay asleep longer. Afternoon naps particularly required continuous holding for both of mine or they didn’t stay asleep.

I'd persevere with the dummies, try a few brands if you like - you might need to hold it in for her at first until she gets the hang of it.
My first 4 all had them and they were a lifesaver. DC5 refused one and it definitely made life (and naps!) more difficult.
I kept them to bed only from 12 months and they all gave them up without much stress between 18 months and 3.

I would pop a dummy in and get them in the sling/pram/swing (only discovered this on DC2 and it was brilliant!) for naps.

Mine is exactly the same! She's now ten weeks and getting better. I've been trying to follow a strict feed, play for a bit, chill in bouncer and then rock to sleep. She's started to prefer lying against my chest facing outwards while I rock. Also white noise loudly helps sometimes. She wakes as soon as I put her down so I've just realised I need to embrace the cuddles for a while. She's getting better and yours will too, hang on in there!!

@ElphabaTheGreen I keep her on boob after she falls asleep but after 10 mins she woke up herself. No transfer. This morning I transferred her successfully but I always wait at least 20 mins. Before using my boob to soothe I'd just put her on me kangaroo care position and then transfer but she just wants boob now! Just put her in cot after she was deep sleeping and she's now bought up all that extra milk as she likely overfed now with all this boob activity. Again screams until I put her back on boob 🤷🏼‍♀️ we thought she had reflux at one point and drs medicated her but I personally think it's just overtiredness

Honestly - just keep feeding and holding on to her if that’s what she wants. She won’t always want that, you won’t give her bad habits. She’s just being a normal baby and will change as she gets bigger. I found white noise helped my overtired baby drop off. I’m looking at my 3 and 5 yo say on the rug and thinking back to them being small. The very early days are just made for lounging around on the sofa with Netflix and chocolate. You can mix things up a bit by hanging out in a coffee shop for a while but still feeding and cuddling

@hj82 I have a 4 week old baby girl and for the last couple of weeks she has awake periods of 2 - 5 hours.
Every baby is different. I bottle feed and when she does sleep its bottle feed to sleep. She wont take a dummy.
I tried everything to get her to sleep and sometimes nothing works until her next bottle feed.
Today she slept a lot and thats from bottle then cuddle to sleep (body heat helps!) I do get stuck beneath her sometimes for a good half hour but hey ho.
Dont stress about it too much (easier said than done I know!) x

Tbh I think some babies are just like this and there's not much you can do about it. DD was a decent night time sleeper as well, she slept 7-9pmish and then we would do a feed and change and then she'd sleep 10/11ish until 6/7ish from being about 8 weeks old. But the day times were HELL. She was a screamer and just cried all the time for no reason that anyone can work out but hardly slept in the daytime. It was fucking exhausting and I absolutely hated most of the first 3 or 4 months of her life tbh. I only managed to breastfeed for 6 weeks and then mix-feed til 12 weeks but when bottle feeding she never ever fed to sleep, and when breastfeeding she did usually feed to sleep but would usually wake when moved to put down or if not/if I kept hold of her she'd still usually only sleep for 30 minutes at a time. Which is not abnormal, lots of babies are like that, and as she got older she got better. She is now 1 and obviously needs much less daytime sleep now but she naps much better and easier, and not really because of anything we have done. She has a dummy and only sleeps without it if she is in the pram or carrier.

I think for the most part you just have to ride this out and try as many different things as you can to get her to sleep. I do agree though that if she will stay asleep on you after a feed, just stick Netflix on and wait it out. I know you can't always do that but you deffo can some of the time. On rare occasions when she would sleep for a couple of hours on me I wouldn't dare move and would just watch a film til she woke. We both needed it!

@Jenda I guess we are just concerned about fostering a bad habit later on. My friend did this and has a 6 month old who won't nap without boob or rocking. I'm not prepared to deal with that. And regardless of what people say about age it definitely starts as soon as you do it. They think it's the only way they can fall asleep. I'm persevering with independence 👍 already I'm seeing a difference. I don't offer her the boob. I put her down in a very dark room and rock her if she cries a lot and if that escalates then boob it is. So far I've not resorted to boob much. She ends up being sick if I keep giving her the boob and that makes me feel terrible 😬

Sufficient sleep is far more important than independence in a five week old OP. You should probably Google ‘fourth trimester’ before you keep pressing on down that path. She’s been IN you for just shy of nine months then had a premature, stressful start to life. That’s why she NEEDS (not wants) to be ON you now.

FWIW, I wasn’t prepared to deal with clingy babies either. But they didn’t really give me a choice - yours might not either. Once I accepted what it was they were clearly telling me they needed, rather than fighting it and thinking I was being a Good Mother by encouraging ‘independence’ at far too tiny an age, my life got a whole lot pleasanter. Not what you want to hear right now, I know, but at every stage there will be something that you don’t want to accept, but the sooner you get adept at adjusting your expectations the better.

Also Google ‘attachment theory’. If you want an independent child in the long term, responding to their needs - even the ones you find inconvenient or unpleasant or against stupid baby manuals - is the way to get one. 150% true in my case. I tried to get DS1 to be ‘independent’ from newborn in all sorts of horrendous ways - he’s still clingy as a 7 year old who needs to sleep with the light on. DS2 got all the holding and feeding to sleep he needed - at four, I now have to pin him down for a cuddle and, in the longer term if not for the first 18 months, has been my far better and more secure sleeper. He even went through a few blissful stages of long cot naps which never happened with DS1 as I never let him learn to sleep securely with me first. I kept trying to push independent naps which made him terrified of sleeping during the day. It was awful.

@ElphabaTheGreen the main issue I'm having is that I can't put her down. During the night she sleeps in the cot just fine. During the day I can't transfer her no matter how Long she's been asleep, she always wakes up. I also can't go anywhere. The park is even difficult because I can't physically hold her on my boob for her entire feed + nap! I've tried dummies but she won't take them. I did manage to slip my nipple out once and put a dummy in there and she continued sleeping for 30 mins. I'm not complaining about all this lovely cuddle time. I'm in heaven with a cuddly baby. I'm just concerned about how long it will go on for. I don't want to be making the wrong decisions long term as you read so much conflicting info. I also want to be able to take my baby to visit family etc and I can't sit there with her on me the entire time, or screaming all the way to the store and back. I'm thinking this is her first leap?? It's so hard to gauge developmental stages etc as we don't know if we use adjusted age or birth date. She's definitely not like a one week old... she has full control of head etc etc but mentally I'm not sure if I go with 6 weeks or 1. For the first month I was going out and she was a dream. This is all very new behaviour

@ElphabaTheGreen I just want to be able to put her in a bouncer or something when she's sleeping. Or even awake without her fussing for me. I literally have no time to do ANYTHING. Unless I just let her cry whilst I wash a load of clothes etc

OP in the kindest way you have very strange expectations of a newborn. She needs to be held and cuddled and fed. You may only be able to have her in the sling or buggy or having a cuddle during the day, mine never put up with being put down to sleep in the day. You are extremely lucky she seems already to understand night from day (you say she goes in the cot at night). Just roll with it. She's very very young.

Around 6 weeks old is when "cluster feeding" in the evening starts. Research that and settle down with Netflix. Also read up on the fourth trimester.