Hi @moonriver32! Congratulations on your baby. Nine weeks is teeny tiny, still in newborn “where did my nice warm, cosy, dark, soothing-noisy womb go? Wah!” territory. You’ve got about 8 million developments and regressions and teeth and sleep changes to go – some good, lots bad (sorry!)
Somewhere in the sleep threads I have a mammoth thread called “Waiting it out”, no longer active but where you’ll find a bunch of us who took the same chaotic go-with-the-flow approach; everyone survived and everyone slept... eventually! Highly recommend a support group thread if you go with the flow.
DD slept through for the first time, on my birthday, at 17 months. Nothing I did; she was still breastfed at night, still put to sleep then gingerly transferred to the cot, she’d had terrible naps that day – she just decided to do it. Her sleep has improved leaps and bounds since (and it was honestly a lot better from about 11 months onwards).
Interventions: We put her in her own room aged one because we were disturbing her, but she’d usually be in with us from midnight on a bad night, 4am on a good night. Her dad did all evening wake-ups from 9 months, and all naps too – shared parental leave – and I think that did help in two ways; she got used to different ways of going to sleep, like cuddles, rather than milk; plus it helped me because I could have an early night or a huge chunk of sleep while he was in charge of the monitor. We gently night weaned at 18 months – she grizzled but didn’t scream or cry, and seemed ready.
Now, each week we get a mixed grab bag of maybe 2 sleep-throughs, 2 only-one-wake-up, 2 kinda-crappy-but-survivable nights, and 1 wild-card “who is this terrible gremlin baby?!” night.
It does get better! You don’t have to do anything but survive if you don’t have the heart, energy or strength to! I fed at every wake-up until I couldn’t any more, then DP stepped in and we split it, and after that she didn’t always want a feed, sometimes a cuddle, sometimes a shush. She took every nap in the sling until she was a year old. Sometimes she still needs to nap on me, if she’s poorly or whatever (and I quite like it, she’s not a cuddly or sit-still kid so it’s a treat). Some nights she needs to cosleep basically draped on top of me; mostly she likes to sleep alone in her cot, undisturbed. Some nights she self settles, some nights she’s cuddled, some nights she pisses about for hours on end and takes off her nappy and widdles on the floor and hides behind the curtains and tells her teddy off and I despair. It’s a phase!
Survival: find a group of like-minded parents of similarly sleepless babies and get a chat going. Do not listen to advice from anyone whose child slept, they do not know what it’s like and they speak from their bums. Eat as much cake, Haribo, cake, chocolate and cake as you see fit. Hot showers and fresh air are not as good as sleep but they help. (Help you, not the baby. Some babies are beyond help and you just have to endure.) Cuddle, feed, rock to sleep – anything to get them to sleep! Enlist help. Nap when and if you can. Let the house go to wrack and ruin, dirt is fine, who needs clean clothes anyway? You can clean once that kid sleeps. Take endless selfies of the baby slumbering on you; I promise one day you’ll look back and think: fuck, that was difficult, and I’m glad it’s over, and I love sleeping now, and I miss them being that small, and maybe I want like 10 more. Godspeed!