Sudden dummy refusal

[Elliedh]

My LO is 4 months old and has always been a terrible napper. With perseverance I have managed to put in a routine of 3 30-40 minute naps per day (never longer). For a couple of weeks he has been going to sleep with a dummy and it made such a difference. As soon as the dummy was in his mouth he was out like a light.

Last week I'd even managed to extend his lunchtime nap by gently stroking him at the end of his first sleep cycle. It worked all week so I was convinced I'd cracked it.

As of yesterday he now refuses a dummy, and consequently will only scream himself to sleep. Patting, stroking, rocking, feeding, nothing seems to soothe him. He'll eventually just fall asleep out of exhaustion. I'm also unable to extend his lunch nap with my usual technique.

I've tried angling and wiggling the dummy to trigger the suck reflex to no avail.

He's also very fussy about his feeds at the moment. Gives ambiguous hunger signals and then flails about at the bottle as if he's being force fed.

Wonder Weeks says he's currently in a leap, but wondering if anyone else has experienced this? Its making me so upset to see him cry himself to slerp, but i don't know what else to do.

3 30 minute naps is not even half the amount of daytime sleep a 4 month old baby needs.

The screaming and outright refusal of any comforting is down to complete and total exhaustion. Sleep deprivation creates intolerance on a massive scale (in adults and babies alike). Its a sign of very high level frustration and total confusion (on the baby's part) of how to help oneself.

Getting in such a state is not unusual, most children will have a day or a few of getting into total sleep deprivation. But not usually a sustained amount of time.

To get out of the total exhaustion, first focus 3 days on Any Sleep, Any How. This is emergency measures, so dont give thought to what is good sleep hygiene, just get the baby asleep. It might mean driving for hours at at time, many times a day for those 3 days. Or walking miles. Or bouncing on a yoga ball with baby in your arms for hours at a time.

Basically for 3 days, dont plan on achieving anything. Let the washing pile up and eat things that are easy (and fast) to prepare. Just for the 3 days "Emergency Measures".

Your aim wants to be no more than 1h awake, that is in normal times so while baby is over tired it may need to be even shorter awake window. Include settling time in this awake time, so if it takes you 20 minutes to get baby to sleep you need to start settling 40 minutes after waking at a maximum. Also include a feed in every wake up. And winding and nappy check.

After you've got out of baby being sleep deprived, keep your awake windows shorter than they are. As a general rule your awake window wants to be around about double nap length. So 30 min naps mean 60 minutes awake, 40 min naps mean 80 mins awake, and so on.

This problem is nothing to do with the dummy. Keep the dummy, it will make settling baby much easier.