Waking every 2 hours after injections

[fibeee]

4 month old DD and I had made some great progress with sleep training after the dreaded regression hit. She was able to settle herself to sleep with her thumb for naps and bedtime and went back to longer stretches at night without waking.

Cue the 16 week injections and our progress has gone backwards again. She can settle herself to sleep when put to bed. But she’s waking every 2 hours and expecting a full feed before passing out in my arms.

I am delirious with sleep deprivation, so emotional all the time and don’t know what to do to help the situation. She’s sleeping 2-3 hours In total during the day so longer naps don’t seem to be the answer. I offer her the boob every couple of hours and she feeds until she’s had enough. Can anyone who has been through this advise?

@GenevaMaybe thanks that schedule would be ideal. But she won’t sleep for longer than 30 mins during the day yet so won’t work for us unfortunately.

How's it going @fibeee?

Better to work on awake windows (awake window double nap length, give or take 15 mins) until naps lengthen to over an hour. Then go for the typical Gina Ford routine for 3 nap days. Having said that, good habit to get into to always try to resettle baby towards the end of every nap time. This practice of resettling is what helps them learn.

Yes to resettling. I had to devote two full weeks to it when my baby was 4 months old
but when it clicked it was heaven as she had a guaranteed 2-2.5 hour nap every lunchtime for two years.

@GenevaMaybe how did you manage to resettle?

I always put my baby down wide awake. If she cried a bit then I patted her to sleep. Her sleep cycle was 45 mins so at 40 mins I’d keep an eye on the monitor and the second I saw her stirring I’d be in like a shot and do shhh pat over to the next sleep cycle. It could take up to 15 mins of shhh pat at the beginning, after a week it was a quick pat and out and then after the second week she went straight through.