Everyone with younger babies is getting so much more sleep

[YellowAndPinks]

Our six month old DD has never slept through. A typical night for her still involves about 3 wake ups.

6:30pm bedtime
9.30pm dream feed (if we leave her she wakes up for milk by 10pm)
12am wakes up needing dummy replaced
3am wakes up for feed
5.20am wakes up for the day

I keep hearing how everyone I know with babies her age or younger are sleeping so much better. Does this sound particularly bad to you, should I be doing something to try and improve her sleep and if so what?

Apart from the 5.20am start it sounds pretty standard. Could you push bedtime back a bit gradually to try and get a later morning? 6.30pm is pretty early.

Sounds great, sounds like one that will improve quickly too, especially if you try to reduce/drop the 3 o clock feed.
Btw - I wanted to say that other people’s babies always sleep better than yours. It’s the law! Just like there’s always someone richer/thinner/happier there’s always a younger baby sleeping through so try not to compare. Sounds like you’re doing great. None of my four slept through til they were 2.

Well your baby sleeps better than my 1 year old most nights! Honestly, it really does get to you when others have better sleepers but comparing just doesn't help anything. Younger babies also won't have gone through the 4 month sleep regression, which is what we never recovered from - she was a great sleeper before that.

When she starts weaning she may sleep better.

How is her weaning going? At 6 months we stopped night feeds for DD and she didnt wake because she had eaten well and had enough milk the day. The wake up and bed time are pretty standard TBH.

Comparing babies sleep can be soul destroying. Friends of our have a baby 3 months younger than our DS. Our DS wouldn't sleep anywhere but on us for 3 months, then we very slowly got him to do sleep, but literally 10 minutes at a time, them 20 till we sleep trained at 6 months. Their DD slept for 13 hours at a time from 4 weeks old. The unfairness of it really affected me. But now their DD is 7 months old she's up every 2 hours and it's killing them as they are used to having as much sleep as they like!

Your baby sounds very typical so I wouldn't worry.

Thank you my DH thinks we have a terrible sleeper but we have nothing to compare it to personally just stories from other people and I was always quite pleased that she does go down on an evening so we do get an evening together.

We are about to start her weaning today so hopefully that will help!

My dd had a similar pattern till about 8 months.
Just be aware that some mum’s will boast about how good a sleeper or whatever their baby is and it’s a big fat lie! I had a neighbour like this with a baby a couple months older than dd, and whether it was deliberate or not I don’t know, as she was fine in every other way, but she managed to make me feel spectacularly rubbish when I had PND and a non sleeping baby.
She was rumbled when she was speaking about it in front of her dh and he asked what child she was speaking about because it certainly wasn’t theirs 😂

Often younger babies sleep better... sleeps continues to change and your baby is sleeping than some toddlers. Best not to compare!

Its normal. My 2yr old still wales 3x

Honestly I believe sleep is a developmental stage just like crawling, talking, sitting up unaided and if you compare babies at every stage it can be disheartening. Keep 'beat practice' with sleep - good regular naps, nice routine, good sleeping arrangements and know that you're doing your best.

Sounds perfectly normal - very similar to my DS when he was 6 months.
He’s almost 8 months old now and still wakes up once (somewhere between 1 and 4) and is up for the day at 6.30/7 (after having a phase of 5/5.30 starts)
He definitely turned a corner after weaning. I could probably phase out the night waking by not feeding him, but at the moment it’s so quick and easy to feed him back to sleep I CBA finding another way to settle him.

Honestly op, I found that a lot of people fibbed about how much their babies slept so I wouldn't listen to anyone else. Your baby is totally normal. But then looking at yours it doesn't look too bad (I'm sure it feels pretty shit though)

My dd used to wake up every 45 minutes for the fun of it and I thought I was going to drop dead from exhaustion.

That sounds about right. In effect you are only waking up once in the night to feed her. I would keep her down stairs with you a little longer and put her bedtime back a little each night. Are you going to bed early and then waking up with her? I found that unbroken sleep left me more exhausted. Don't go to bed until she has had her last feed/dummy - midnight if needs be.

My 9 month old still wakes up about 3 times a night for milk. She wakes at 12, 3, then around 6, at which point we'll bring her in to bed and she'll sleep til 8 or 9! I'm happy for her to continue waking in the night if it means she doesn't wake up early, I truly hate early mornings.

She goes to bed at 8 though, 6.30 is still daytime for us. that's when we'll be having dinner.

There was a stage a few weeks ago where my then nearly one year old was waking up every 40 mins.

The rest of their life so far though they have had a pretty similar pattern to yours.

Now at nearly 13 mo they are just starting to stretch out every now and then to about 6 hour blocks.

I've found that a lot of the sleeping through the night babies have parents with a very loose definition of what a wake up is.

If your child wakes up needing a feed/ settling at any point then they haven't slept through, even if you call it a dream feed.

If you put the baby to bed at 7 and it wakes up at 10 and midnight but then sleeps through until 5.30 then you've had a good few hours, but they still aren't sleeping through.

Both if the above are real examples of babies whose parents have gleefully told me are sleeping through.

1. comparison is the thief of joy
2. sounds pretty normal for a 6mo!

i consider that my LO sleeps through but he wakes up 2/3 times a night for his dummy to be put in, i don't think that really counts as a proper wake up..

And 3) some people call a block of more than 5 hours 'sleeping through'... . Don't worry about what others are saying.

My baby is much younger (3 months), won't settle til 8 or 9pm – despite our best efforts! – and currently wakes up after 2 hours, then 1.5 hours til 4/5am, then hourly til 7am, and still poos at night. So you're doing brilliantly!

Don't don't don't compare, though. It doesn't matter what someone else's baby does because you can't make your baby copy theirs. I have driven myself nuts the last few weeks asking about other people's babies and making myself miserable when I could have been resting/trying to delatch the snoozing baby on my boob a little earlier in the process.

Weaning made absolutely no difference to DD. She still has a night feed too, although that's more because it's the quickest way to get her to sleep and I do need to stop it.

mrsed1987 except it is a wake up. He hasn't slept through the night without you having to go and intervene. When DC2 was waking up every 45 mins recently all she wanted 9/10 was he dummy putting back in. Can I call that sleeping through the night too then?

See OP.... your definition of sleeping through is likely very different to others.

I don’t think your little one is doing too badly OP but I am not sure why you are giving her a dream feed at 9.30 if you know she will wake up 30 minutes later for milk. To me that’s just disrupting her natural rhythm. She can obviously go 6 hours between feeds so I’d be inclined to let her be and see how she goes. It might just make a difference to how many times you need to go to her in the night. Also does she really need her dummy when you put her down to sleep?
As others have said 6.30 is quite early for bed time - even 30 minutes later could make a difference. She’s getting to the age where if you haven’t already started you should be beginning weaning soon and this may make a difference to how long she sleeps.
I assume that she is breast rather than bottle bed, but if she’s bottle fed you could try giving her an extra ounce before bed.
Every baby is different and although it’s difficult to remember accurately I don’t recall having to get up more than once in the night for any of my totally breast fed babies after they were 6 months other than when they were unwell. I never woke any of them to feed but with my first I do remember feeling a bit resentful of the fact that because she had her last feed before bed at about 8.30pm I couldn’t really go anywhere because a) I couldn’t get the hang of expressing and b) she wouldn’t take a bottle anyway. I vowed that I wouldn’t get into the same pattern with the others and they were put to bed for the night at about 7 and then if they woke before I went to bed, which they usually did, then slept through.
My sisters bottle fed finger sucking baby is coming up to 9 months now and he has been a total dream sleep wise for several months now. He has his last bottle at about 7pm and sleeps right through to about 6.15. I know this absolutely to be true because we’ve just been away with them for the week and the seagulls were the only things that caused us sleepless nights.

Sounds normal to me. DS was like that though we put him to bed at 8-9pm.

He still has never slept through, he's 2 now. I await the day that full night sleep happens with gleeful anticipation...