7M/O STILL doesn't sleep!

[rottiemum88]

I've read so many of these threads from others, but none seem to exactly match our situation so I wonder if anyone might be able to offer any help/advice. I'm due back at work (full time) in exactly a month and if things haven't improved by then I'm going to really struggle

DS is almost 7 months and as a newborn was an amazing sleeper. He'd go down in his next-to-me crib when we went to bed at 10ish and sleep through until 3/4, have a quick feed and go back to sleep until 7. This all changed at 8 weeks old, when despite us changing nothing else about his routine, he started waking up hourly through the night!

Initially we thought introducing more of a routine might help, so we brought bedtime forward (gradually) to 7:30/8pm and did bath, story, feed and then into his crib, but it didn't make any difference, he continued to wake hourly through the night.

Other things we've tried:

• DS has always been combi fed with one bottle of formula given by DH when he gets home from work. We changed the formula feed to the last one before bed in the hope he'd sleep longer - didn't work
• Putting down drowsy but awake
• Feeding to sleep
• Rigid daytime routine with set nap times, walk times, playtime etc
• Days where we just go with the flow
• Earlier bedtimes
• Llater bedtimes
• Giving a dummy, which DS accepted for naps during the day but for some reason not at night. Whenever we've tried to give the dummy if he wakes at night, he becomes even more agitated and won't settle again until he's had a feed
• DH doing the bedtime routine/night wakings. DS just doesn't settle well for him and refuses a bottle altogether in the middle of the night. The longest I've managed to hold out was an hour and a half of DH holding and rocking him without success before I caved and gave him a feed so he'd go back to sleep

We moved him to his full size cot at 6 months after he outgrew the next-to-me and we thought lack of space might actually be disrupting his sleep. If anything the cot seems to have made things worse and he's sometimes waking every 30-45 minutes tossing and turning and getting himself caught in the bars. I never wanted to cosleep but have resorted to doing so over the past few weeks just to get any kind of sleep myself. If anything this really hasn't helped DS as he's even more restless and unsettled, but at least I can sleep through some of the feeds.

I feel like there must be something really obvious I'm missing but I'm so tired these days I'm struggling to see the situation clearly anymore and just concentrate on surviving each day the best I can. The one thing we haven't tried I guess is moving him to his own room, but I've been trying to avoid it if I'm honest because if his sleep is still as bad as it is now, it's just going to make life even harder than it already is traipsing across the landing 8-10 times a night.

Any help would be very gratefully received!

Sorry it's long

Definitely look into food intolerance- especially as you give a formula feed before bedtime. If it's cmpa/ cmpi (look up symptoms) he will be waking tossing and turning all night with stomach cramps. Also reflux is strongly linked with milk protein intolerance. He sounds uncomfortable rather than unable to sleep.

@Mrspeak I know, I really need to be more relaxed about it all. I was doing quite well until it dawned on me that I'll be back to work soon and I've suddenly started to panic that I just won't cope on so little sleep. Saying that though, I sometimes think a day at work will actually be far easier than finding ways to entertain DS all day so I might actually find it a welcome relief!

@Sontagsleere yes I'm definitely going to look into it. From a quick glance some of the symptoms would definitely ring true. We don't always give the formula feed before bed anymore as it didn't seem to make any difference, but he still has at least one bottle a day so it's a regular part of his diet.

I had this with dd who’s almost 9 months,although she was a dreadful sleeper from day 1. Until very recently she was co-sleeping but waking around 7 times to breastfeed even though she was weaned on 3 meals a day and had 7oz of formula before bed. All naps were on me and she point blank refused to go into a cot. I was completely exhausted and at my wits end. I hate to say this but in desperation I weaned her off the breast,within a week she was sleeping through 8-8 most nights in her own cot and going down for naps in the cot without fuss. She does still occasionally wake once but I just give her a drink of water and she goes back off. I am upset that I stopped breastfeeding her but I couldn’t have carried on as we were as it was affecting my mental health and my parenting and I was too exhausted to do anything with her and was always in a foul mood. I’m not saying this is the right decision for anyone else and I still miss feeding her but we’re both much happier now we’re getting more sleep.

Cows milk protein allergy messing up all the sleep over here too. My daughter went through a period of feeding every 20 mins. It was brutal. She would feed then feel uncomfortable and seek boob to feel comfortable again but that would set the cycle off as she was getting more CMP via the milk. Dropping milk from my and her diet got us to 4 hours between feeds at night.

Sleep also got much better again when she was fully on solids with no boob or bottles to drink so has slept through far more consistently from about 11 months.....

Some are just really shit sleepers and at 7 months being a shit sleeper will be the norm rather than the minority I would think.....

We self diagnosed and checked by cutting out all dairy. It can take 10 days to 2 weeks to get out of the system. symptoms included;
Rash on face after feeds (eczema type)
Really stinky poos although breast fed so shouldn't smell.
Difficulty winding
'Colic' type symptoms
Hated car seat as nappies dug in and made the tummy pain worse

Second baby has it too but I knew to spot the signs and cut out early this time. He sleeps for 4 hour stretches and has done since I cut dairy out (in week 2 , he's now 10 weeks)

I know it's a small thing but get a cot bumper, it's padded all around inside and makes it cosy. Could it be the mattress or th lightning?
Wonder why he's so different at night. Could you try heavy tea like porridge?

@Sevo7 can I ask how you weaned her? Similar problems here.

Maybe try a snack before bed instead if formula I. E. Yogurt, mashed banana, etc

The newborn sleep cycle is different from an older baby which is why you find at 2-3 months they start waking up a lot more. Your baby has a sleep cycle of 45 mins to an hour so it seems like he is waking up every time and unable to settle himself without input from you. By picking him up and/ or feeding him and rocking him you are ingraining these sleep crutches and he thinks he needs them to go back to sleep. You need to teach him to go back to sleep himself. It is a little tricky with breastfed babies of 7 months as you can’t be entirely sure they aren’t hungry if they wake up say once, but like you mention, he isn’t starving every hour.

If he is eating three meals a day and having plenty of milk, he shouldn’t need feeding at night. You should always leave him in his cot and never pick him up when he wakes, just shh and pat him back to sleep. You can stay in the room or check in every three minutes. Once he learns how to self settle then he won’t keep waking up crying at the end of every sleep cycle, he will just sleep. If you are worried he is hungry then maybe feed him in the middle of the night once. Also being very strict on nap times and bed times also helps. It’s a bit of a pain if you like more flexible parenting, but a sacrifice worth making maybe if you like sleep.

This is basically what a (very expensive) sleep consultant told a friend.

My DD woke hourly one night after previously sleeping well at around 8 weeks old.

Turned out to be silent reflux which she outgrew at 9ish months.

We went to the Dr who have us gaviscon, but we didn't find much success with that, so we gave her (aptimil) reflux milk. It was so thick it would barely go through the teat! We mixed reflux and standard milk so it was thicker and kept her upright after feeds for 30 minutes. Propped up her bed and she was back to sleeping through.

I hope you find some respite soon though, whatever it might be.

My ds now 7 woke every hour on the hour at your babies age. I was losing the will to live. He would go to sleep at 8pm but then wake bawling at 9 then 10.30 then 12 then 2am. I tried EVERYTHING.. at 13 months he decided he would sleep through the night 8pm till 7am. After everything I tried I was furious that he decided it was time to sleep through
I wish there was a one for all answer but sometimes nothing works and the baby decides... Sorry

Don't get a cot bumper, they're a suffocation risk.

Plato, how is shhh-pat not a "sleep crutch"? Surely by most sleep consultants' sleep cycle theories anything you do teaches babies they need it to sleep.

OP, I'm like you in that I've read alllll the threads, and spoken to millions of friends, I'm obsessed with sleep; and I think – leaving aside medical issues which your baby may have, and resolving them may help – it only ever comes down to three solutions:

1. Brutal & not always effective CC or CIO. Baby (maybe) sleeps, can regress due to developmental leaps, teething, changes in routine, so you have to do it again
2. Looooooong full-of-effort getting-out-of-bed stuff like shhhh-pat, PUPD, disappearing chair, etc. Hard work and eventually the baby figures sleep out
3. Cosleep, feed to-sleep survival mode, muddling through and waiting it out, getting as much help as you can, napping at lunch/on bus if you're back at work, and eventually the baby figures sleep out on their own

It sounds like you're already on Plan 3. I would try to rule out anything medical and then just stick with what you're doing, getting what sleep you can. You'll be more rested co-sleeping than you will getting up and shhh-patting and faffing about.

Thanks for all the replies. For those who mentioned weaning/giving more solid food, we only started weaning around 3 weeks ago when he turned 6 months and he hasn't taken very well to it so far. He absolutely won't entertain being fed from a spoon (we've tried all sorts, including giving him the spoon!), so there's no significant volume of anything going in. He's happy to pick up finger foods and put them to his mouth, but won't actually swallow anything and gets quite upset if for e.g. he's sucking a bread stick and a bit comes off in his mouth, he'll do anything to make sure he spits it back out rather than swallows it 🤦🏼‍♀️ All in all everything's just a bit of a challenge with him at the moment and he seems to be very wilful/stubborn so takes his time to come round to things.

I was hoping it was an unlucky fluke but the last couple of nights we've also added waking up early (today it was 4am) to his already terrible sleep and I know we haven't changed anything else about his routine to cause it, so I guess it's just the way he is.

Fingers crossed he grows out of it sooner rather than later!

Thanks again

@burritofan Thank you, that sums things up pretty well. I definitely think feeding has become a major sleep crutch for DS, but as I mentioned in a previous post, he won't entertain replacing it with anything else at the moment. Even when myself or DH have held and rocked him, shhhh'ed him etc he just becomes more and more distraught that he's not being fed, properly red-faced "angry" crying until I give in. Cosleeping is the only way I've been getting any kind of sleep, although even then not always much.

MIL has offered a couple of times to take him overnight to give me chance to catch up on some sleep and I've always declined, but I'm tempted now to take her up on it just to recharge a bit as I'm really starting to struggle in the days. Who knows, a night away from what he knows might also be enough to break the cycle for DS and him get some decent sleep too; it can't be much fun for him either waking up on the hour every hour and having no way to get himself back to sleep without intervention

Plato, how is shhh-pat not a "sleep crutch"? Surely by most sleep consultants' sleep cycle theories anything you do teaches babies they need it to sleep.

Ah, you are supposed to do it every three minutes to reassure them. You can stay in the room in between or leave and come back.

I wrote it in the middle of the night when I was feeding my 7 month old who wakes up once a night to feed 😂. I’m definitely no sleep expert and fed my youngest in the night until she was quite old, but I think I will definitely wean night feeding earlier this time. Not quite yet though!

I would 100% take my MIL's help in this situation, and my MIL is an absolute arse.

It's not a forever solution, but does he sleep OK on people? Can DH take him from, say, 7-11pm, dozing on his shoulder and giving bottles if he wakes? You sleep during that time. Then do bedtime routine and cot at 11. DH takes him again for an hour before work while you power nap. It means giving up evenings for a while but do you really have evenings when you're sleep deprived?

When your son finally clicks with sleep and does longer stretches - and he will! - you can move the routine forward again/sort it all out then/get your evenings back.

@burritofan thanks for the suggestions - sadly he won't sleep on people no, hasn't done since he was tiny. DH is trying his best to be helpful and if I put DS down for the night (ha!) at 8ish, he'll always offer to try and resettle him the first few times he wakes so I can have a bit of time to myself downstairs, but it always descends into a complete battle to get him back to sleep, whereas if I do it I at least know I can feed him and he'll generally be back off in 5-10 minutes. Mornings are also a bit difficult as we have two very big and energetic dogs who need to be walked, so DH is already up at 5am and then out of the house for the next two hours tiring them. So, MIL it is! Hopefully one day it will get easier...

@NoliteTeBastardesCarborundorum - we more or less went cold turkey. She spent the night at my dm where she only had formula and for the first time ever slept through which I couldn’t believe. When she came back I continued with the bottles but pumped for my own comfort and when she woke in the night (just once from that night) I gave formula. On day 3 I regretted my decision to stop and went back to giving her the odd breastfeed and immediately she went back to waking every 90 minutes so I stopped again and her sleep went better again. After about a week I dropped the night formula feed as she was only taking an oz and offered water instead. I then started placing her in her cot by the bed with her dummy and comforter, she self settled no problem which I was very suprised about. I slowly cut the pumping down until after 3 weeks I’m now pumping once a day which I give to dd for her afternoon feed. It really wasn’t an easy decision and I do feel sad sometimes that I’m not breastfeeding but I try and reason with myself we did 8 months and that me being actually able to enjoy dd rather than living life in an exhausted fog is the better option,but as I say it’s not for everyone.

I should add dd was already very happy with a dummy and would take a bottle anyway, I don’t think I’d of been able to do it if the breast was her only source of comfort.

Just touching on the reflux thing. My dd didn't outgrow her silent reflux until she was 2. Weaning made no difference. Have you tried raising the head end of the cot? It was the acid coming up and going down again that made my dd an absolute shit sleeper. Milk would soothe it a bit, hence why she always wanted a feed through the night. What solved it (a bit) for us was getting her meds right (combo of ranitidine and omeperazole). She also had cmpa, so no dairy for me and dairy free formula as combi fed.

Is he napping too much in the day? There is a chart somewhere that says how many hours sleep they need at each age.
If he's not eating mich then he could well be hungry. Can you increase to more bottles per day? He will have to have bottle at nursery anyway. So you could try increasing over next few weeks to get him ready?
Have you tried baby rice or porridge? Used to fill mine up. Mine had hungry baby milk at bedtime to fill them up.
Black out blinds in own room would be best. Is he is sleeping bag?

@Sevo7 I do keep coming back to the idea of moving him completely onto formula. That was always our intention once he got to 6 months and is the reason we never delayed with introducing him to a bottle from being a few weeks old as I didn't want there to be any chance of him rejecting it if we tried later on.

Problem is, DS ended up in hospital at 4 days old with suspected sepsis and was very ill for the best part of a week before he was discharged with what they eventually said had been a bad case of bronchiolitis. I'd also had an EMCS so my milk didn't come in until day 5. Between the two things, the odds seemed really stacked against us breastfeeding, but then we did and have carried on ever since with very few issues (apart from the sleep!).

Anecdotally from speaking to friends and reading thousands of posts on the internet, I've convinced myself that breastfeeding is probably a big part of the current problem with his sleep so if I stopped we might see an improvement quite quickly, but after seeing DS so ill when he was tiny and breastfeeding being the only positive thing I could do for him then (barely even held him for the first week as he was attached to so many lines and tubes) I'm still really struggling with cutting down/letting go as I know it'll probably be the beginning of the end, given that I won't be able to feed during the day either once I'm back at work next month.

Accept all of that's my own choice though so it's potentially me that's the problem here rather than him

@converseandjeans

Is he napping too much in the day?
Our HV gave us a leaflet with sleep requirements by age, so we've roughly tried to stick to that. It's changed since he was small, but right now he tends to go 2.5-3 hours awake before he starts to look like he needs a nap (rubbing eyes, etc) which is about right for his age I think. His actual naps vary anything from 20 minutes to 2 hours with seemingly no reason why, but however long the nap is I just reset to 2.5 hours from the end of the last nap and look out for his sleep cues again. So it usually works out that he'll have 3 naps a day, with no napping after 4:30ish for us to start his bedtime routine at 7:30

Can you increase to more bottles per day?
Yes can definitely try this, only my own reluctance has stopped me until now

Have you tried baby rice or porridge?
Baby porridge yes, but he's currently a spoon refuser and won't eat it 🙁

Is he is sleeping bag?
He was up until the hot weather started and since then he's been in just a sleepsuit or even just a nappy on the really hot nights. None of these seem to have made any difference to his sleep, it still follows the same pattern

@seven201 That's interesting, DS has been prescribed both ranitidine and omeprazole in different doses, but never at the same time. To be honest neither ever seemed to do anything for him so I'm not convinced it's reflux, though still not ruling it out or even a potential intolerance like some PP have mentioned.

Not sure our Drs will be too responsive to the idea. I always got the impression they felt I was just being a hypochondriac first time mum over the potential reflux, but agreed to trying medication because DS's weight centiles have dropped quite a lot since he was born. He was a 9lb13 baby and 98th centile, whereas now he's still 98th centile for height and only 25th for weight so a bit of a strong bean bless him. I might investigate whether our private health insurance would cover any kind of allergy testing for him.

String bean even!

You might as well try propping the head end of his cot up in the mean time. Good luck!

They don't really test for allergies - it's more diagnosed through eliminating foods to see if that helps. There are skin pick tests but they aren't that reliable.