3 month sleeping through?

[Crimblecrumble1990]

Hi, I have a 3 month old and have been doing a bit of reading on bedtime routines etc. I feel like I'm constantly reading about babies 'sleeping through' bar a regression here or there - do that many babies really sleep through? Or does sleeping through mean night feeds are involved too but they don't count?

My baby is a good sleeper but will wake for milk every 3 hours. I feel he does this regardless of how much he has fed/slept in the day. He feeds every 3 hours in the day too - I think this is a hangover from when he was in the NICU, we tried to go into responsive feeding but it's like he is conditioned into feeling hungry every 3 hours. Does anyone have any advice on how to possibly stretch this out a little at night time?

Or any advice on bedtime routines in general? Up until now he's just been on the sofa and I take him to bed with me when I go up but have started with a bath, bottle, swaddle, white noise & bed routine recently.

Does anyone have any advice on how to possibly stretch this out a little at night time?

Feeding more in the daytime and not having a feed to sleep association is how you manage this.

The way to get baby having more milk in the daytime is to feed more frequently. Assuming you're bottle feeding, you should always be offering more milk that baby will drink anyway so you don't get more milk into baby by trying to do bigger feeds. But if you fed baby every 2h (or 2.5h) from 7am-11pm then less calories are needed from 11pm-7am.

Also not having a feed to sleep association. You need another way to get baby to sleep, that doesn't involve feeding. Dummy is most obvious. If baby can only get back to sleep by being fed / having a full tummy then baby will need night feeds even when not hungry.

There's always been lots of debate about what sleeping through means, but it certainly means no feeds / wake ups. Some consider no feeds/wake ups between 11pm-7am as sleeping through, others consider 10h-12h without waking as sleeping through. Lots of babies at 3 months old can sleep 12h without waking or being fed. Lots of other babies are nowhere close to that as 3 months.

Very, very few babies sleep through at 3 months.

To extend the time between feeds, try stretching it a little bit each time. When he first seems hungry try and distract/delay for as long as you can, but don't let him become upset. This might be only 5 or ten minutes to start, but will slowly increase the spacing between feeds.

I would do this in the daytime first because it's easier to just feed at night and do the distracting in the day.

Once he's at 4 hours between feeds, day and night, you can start to stretch the night feeds out a little more. There will be a natural move to eating more in the daytime and less at night as he gets older too.

My 12-month old feeds honestly every couple of hours during the day unless napping. Can be starving an hour after food (breastfed).

Has in the past week started sleeping 7-8 hours per night, a feed then a sleep again.

This is AMAZING after nearly three months of wake ups every three hours max.