Any advice on my 5 month old’s sleep?

[Hulabalula]

I’ve not done any sleep training with my 5mo. I’ve followed her lead. She was a very sleepy newborn but her sleep went a bit out of the window at 12 weeks old.

I’m kind of fine with my approach but I do worry she doesn’t get enough sleep so just thought I’d see if anyone can make any suggestions based on her current sleeping habits. Then I can look at things I can slightly tweak to see if it helps. CIO or CC not my cup of tea, and she is too young anyway.

She is EBF. Will not take a bottle or dummy. Can fall asleep being fed, in the car or in the pram but not always. Will sometimes fall asleep with a cuddle. Sometimes I pat her bottom to help her drift off. Sometimes I just need to stroke her nose. Sometimes she will fall asleep on her own. Most of the time she needs help.

She definitely understands bed time as it’s never a struggle to get her to fall asleep when I take her up (unlike naps which can be a struggle). But she will wake up a lot in the first 3-4 hours, regardless of how she fell asleep. She might only be asleep for 2 mins before waking and never longer than an hour. She wakes up crying very loudly.

First couple of wakings she will have a decent feed and go back down. The rest seem to be comfort related. I usually feed back to sleep but in reality other than the first two she just uses me as a dummy. I try and cuddle back to sleep where I can.

After the first 3-4 hours of frequent wakings she will sleep for anything up to 7 hours but usually only 4 before waking for a feed and then going back down for 2-3 more hours. This part of the night is not an issue. I understand she is young and I get that she will wake in the night.

Daytime naps are a bit irregular in terms of length but she will usually have 3.

This pattern of 3-4 hours of frequent wakings at the beginning of the night emerged at 12 weeks and hasn’t changed since so I don’t think it’s cluster feeding.

Any ideas? I’m not desperate to change things and am happy to follow her lead but if there are any slight adjustments I can make so she gets the sleep she needs then I’d be happy to try them. Also happy if you just tell me it’s all normal and there nothing I can do.

Bump

Further bump - also forgot to mention we have tried co-sleeping and her own room and neither worked. She’s usually in a Next 2 Me.

My DD was similar, and EBF also. It sounds fairly normal to me, she would wake a few times during the night for milkies at that age.

My only recommendation would be to try to schedule the day time naps, perhaps 2 naps would be better so she gets into a rhythm of when it's time to sleep. Routine is what worked best for us.

I would start by working out how much sleep she's really getting at night and then see what day time naps would be best, such as 2 naps for 90 minutes etc. Ideally, she should be getting 14 hours in 24 hours at that age but every child is different.

Good luck!

Thanks @KidneyChaos

Yes I think a little bit more structure to our day is a good thing to try next. I think I’ll track her sleep for a few days to see if there are any natural patterns and go from there.