Witching hour, routines, miserable baby

[EdgarAllenSloe]

DD2 is eight weeks. I never thought about introducing a routine this early with DD1, because she was happy and content and it seemed easier to just go with what suited her - and what suited her was fairly obvious.

DD2 is different. She has two 'awake' patches. Morning time, when she's squawky and horrible while we all struggle to get ready while constantly jiggling, feeding her, moving her from playmat to bouncer to somebody's shoulder - none of which settles her for longer than four minutes before she starts whinging again. She usually falls asleep when we get going - when I take DD1 to nursery or if we head out for the day. If in the sling, she'll mostly sleep all day. If it's a nursery day, she often wakes up when the two of us get back and has a slightly squirmy period - a little bit unsettled for an hour or two, then she falls asleep. She will sleep all day. Today, she's woken for three feeds and basically fallen straight back asleep after each one.

Evening time is when she wakes up. And she's miserable. I can't feed her to sleep - she squirms, yanks off the boob, chokes, cries. She isn't happy in the bouncer for longer than a few minutes, isn't happy being put down, isn't happy being held. NOTHING I do gets her off to sleep. I think she may end up overtired, but nothing I do gets her off to sleep - which I've tried from about 30 minutes of being awake.

I take her to bed with me and it's pot luck what happens next: can take a ages, sometimes she's already asleep when we go up. She'll do a few stints overnight, but not so long and much more unsettled than she is in the day, when she's basically asleep except for a few quick feeds for 8-9 hours.

What do I do? Should I try and have slightly longer awake patches in the day? Do I need more of a routine? Set bedtime? What the fuck happens at 6pm that turns her into an angst-ridden banshee? I don't know what to do. I'm struggling with the evenings. DH is REALLY struggling, because it's all he sees of her - endless misery after a long day at work. At least I get sedate daytimes - but I'd really love to flip her day and night sleep. I know broken nights are par for the course, but I'd have thought the nocturnalism would be settling by eight weeks.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Beyond "this too shall pass" - because I know it will eventually but I'd REALLY like to help it along before one of decides to move out!

TL;DR - Miserable baby, horrible evenings, can't settle her, help.

Also, all the obvious: yes, I'm keeping it bright/noisy in the day, quiet/dark/boring at night. Tried white noise. Fed on demand and stacking on weight. Getting-to-sleep techniques that don't work: feeding, rocking, shushing, sling. She's in a sidecar cot next to me - and sometimes in the bed (safely). In the day she'll happily sleep on me or in the Moses basket, wherever I choose to leave her.

I’m sure you’ve thought of this but sounds a lot like colic. Gripe water or infacol before a feed? I’d say slightly and just slightly longer awake periods in the day if you think she’s sleeping a lot. Do you swaddle for her sleeps? Swaddling and white noise saved my life!

Oh gosh that sounds hard OP . Its been a while since mine were babies but I definitely tried to stimulate them in between daytime naps and have a rough structure to day time sleeps. I hour in morning, two or more at lunchtime and no sleeping past 3.30 to put them down for 7. I remember singing, reading books, getting older DD to occupy them and DH when he came home. It's a hard time but you need his help. Hope it improves soon.

From what you say I’m not sure she has any happy/comfortable awake periods day or night? The one to two hours after she first wakes on a morning I’d expect to be her more chilled but it sounds as though even then she’s not happy?
Assuming that’s a correct assumption, and assuming you feed when she wakes then she’s either massively tired or uncomfortable for some reason - colic/reflux/teeth?
What happens if, when she wakes on a morning you fed her and put her in the sling while you all get ready? If she goes back to sleep perhaps she’s just so overtired generally that you need a few days of resetting her sleep?

Regarding the witching hour, or hours in our case, DS had this from weeks 6-13. Think it gradually got better from 11 weeks. He did exactly what you describe - crying, whining, not feeding and crying at the breast and pulling away, very agitated and overtired but wouldn’t sleep, didn’t want to be held, didn’t want to be put down. It was like someone flicked a switch at 6pm and it usually eased off by 10pm but I felt sorry for DH because he’s be at work all day and the only time he’d see DS is when the witching hours were in full force. We tried various things and the following occasionally helped but not all the time - white noise while suckling on muslin, being walked in the pram outside, being carried around the house and showing him things to distract him, and he would often have a bottle of expressed milk because trying to breastfeed him seemed to agitate him but the bottle seemed to relax him for some reason. Sometimes none of this worked and we just had to ride it out. If all else fails just remember it will pass, not what you want to hear I know, but for us it ended as quickly as it started.

Thank you, hive mind!

I have thought about colic and reflux. It's just odd the way her daytime feeds aren't affected - her nights a little bit, and her evening feeds are basically torment. I can't get Infacol or gripe water into her - she screams bloody murder and regurgitates them.

Gookledy that's exactly the issue - she's almost never happy. We do get 15-20 minute bouts of peace here and there, but she's basically either asleep or miserable. I will definitely give the sling trick a go - might need to be a non-nursery day. Can't really get myself dressed with a baby sling on! It's hard to believe she's tired given that the miserable evening follows an entire day asleep. But it's worth a try!

I'm going to try some brief awake stints tomorrow to see if that helps shift anything, then try putting her straight into sling after first feed on our first non-nursery day. I should probably try harder with the gripe water too...it's just so hard to do anything that makes her cry when she's already so thoroughly miserable the whole time.

My little boy was like this. Would sleep all day essentially bit come early evening would kick off massively untill we finally got him down say 10 or 11 at night (or mayne even later). For him I think it was a combination of a massively sensitive personality (which I know see more clearly as he's got a bit older) and the fact that he'd used up all his 'nap time' in the day and just needed to be awake for a bit, but couldn't handle being awake so long. For us it resolved at 11 weeks when I decided I would 'force' him to take a catnap in his moses basket (basically half and hour of shh pat to achieve this) so that I could have 30 mins of peace with my husband to eat dinner. It was 6.30. Within 3 days this became his new bedtime and all the screaming was over.