10 wk old sleeping 7pm-12pm then wakes every 2 hours

[bxroro]

Hi everyone!

Appreciate we are very lucky to even get such a long stretch of sleep at any point in the evening but we are trying to figure out if there is a way of pushing forward that stretch and would love some advice.

Some background info - our LO is a big boy, 13lb and 60cm although his Dad is 6"8 so we are not surprised! But with this he is a very hungry baby. We feed formula now after exclusively BF for 7 weeks.

We are very lucky as he is pretty good at being put down 'sleepy' and getting himself to sleep without being rocked although he does have white noise and a swaddle bag.

At night time we put him down around 7.30 after a feed and a bath, and he will then happily sleep for up to 5 hours, we even had 6 hours at one point. We then feed him when he next wakes up so usually around 11/12 but the he wakes up every 2-2.5 hours afterwards.

He clearly can go that long without feeding, a nappy change and self settling so during the night when he keeps waking crying and fussy it's frustrating as we aren't sure what he needs from us. We try soothing which doesn't work sometimes, then we'll try a feed and he maybe takes between 50-100ml at each wake up.

It's almost like he's topping himself up, or that he's feeding for comfort out of habit.

Any advice would be massively appreciated! Really struggling without visitors and how isolated I'm feeling right now so hoping to find some support on here :) xx

Watching with interest as DS is almost exactly the same age & situation 😩 you’re most definitely not alone!

You could try changing nappy when he is sleepy again after 50-100mls so he finishes bottle? Might last a little longer.

When we were at this stage i would go to bed at 9.30/10pm and dh would do first feed around 12/1am then I would do the next one at around 4am meant we both got a reasonable sleep.

That all sounds fairly typical for such a little one. They do still wake frequently, even if they can go for longer stretches, sometimes they don’t want anything other than to be with someone. I would echo the pp and say try to alternate who does which waking so that you can get a longer stretch of sleep. We found our frustration levels were directly linked to the amount of sleep we had!

Thanks everyone!

So we did a couple of things differently last night and got 8-11, 11.30-3, 3.30-6! So really only one middle of the night feed which was amazing.

We also managed it all without a dummy so I think the fact it wasn't falling out of his mouth meant he didn't cry for it and it didn't wake him up.

We allowed his last nap of the day to run slightly later, and did his bedtime routine later as a result. We also switched up doing the order, so we did feed, bath, bed rather than bath, feed, bed.

We also did what @Sally872 suggested which was changing his nappy halfway through his feed as you're right he seemed to take more that way and then was clearly more satisfied for longer... great tip.

So Feed at 7, bath at 7.30, bed at 8! He went off by himself without dummy. Still not quite sure how or why but we're going to try and do the same thing today and see what happens :)

That's great! Glad you got a decent sleep.