4 month sleep regression support group

[crazychemist]

Hi All,

Anyone want to join me for mutual handholding through 4 month sleep regression?

I’ve got twin boys, and am finding it quite tough at the moment. Long naps are completely a thing of the past, 45 mins tops. Waking every 2 hours at night. Classic 4 month sleep regression stuff.

I’m doing my best to get the majority of naps in their (our) room with swaddle, white noise, as dark as I can get it. They aren’t really self settling at the moment - I’ve been giving them a dummy because otherwise they disturb each other before they nod off. They also have a feed very close to going to sleep to get them nice and drowsy, but there’s at least a 5 minute gap between feed and sleep except at bedtime (which is mayhem due to overtiredness).

How are you finding it? What have you tried so far?

Me too @OhToBeASeahorse! I worked an hour of feeding/shushing/patting/holding/bouncing for 27 minutes of nap! I was following Huckleberry but she was not ready to sleep. Starting to think it’s because I’m starving her of stimulation on boring lockdown land. All she gets to do is watch me eat breakfast, watch me shower, watch me eat lunch...

As for the sleeping partners, DH has taken to the spare room which I actually prefer - at least it means I don’t have to think about him as well in the middle of the night! I tend to direct all my rage through the wall at the neighbours and their midnight renovations instead...

@BerthaYoung god its exhausting isnt it.

I found I was getting really angry and I was worried I would shout at DD (I have in the past, I felt horrendous) so I've selected a soft toy to direct my ire at.

Gosh I'm tired. When she does 30 min naps I'm finding it really hard to know when to try next.

We dis gradual retreat with my toddler at 8 mkt hs and it worked fantastically but I dont think DD is ready to night wean and I'm not sure how that works! At night I lay her down and her arms and legs are just going bananas. I don't want to swaddle because she is almost rolling..

God. Gah!!!

Yes @OhToBeASeahorse, it’s so tough. I found it hard to find my calm today, and I’m sure that didn’t help DD feel calm and sleepy. DH took DD out for a walk after work which gave me a bit of headspace. It helps me to know short (30-45 minute) naps are appropriate for this developmental stage, and to focus on length of time awake rather than length of nap. Still, tiny naps mean no breaks for us and that’s so hard! Can you get a break at all over Easter weekend?

@OhToBeASeahorse I really feel you - I found the short naps phase infuriating and I don't even have a toddler to contend with! I got a lot of comfort from reading www.babysleepscience.com/single-post/2017/03/20/nap-101-post-1-does-my-baby-have-a-nap-problem - not that I've managed to get mine sleeping in the cot for naps yet, so I'm probably not one to give advice(!) but I found it helpful to know that taking her for naps in the pram etc was a totally fine option sleep-wise at that stage.

@BerthaYoung the neighbor situation sounds terrible, poor you! I spend probably far too much time worrying about being the noisy neighbour, but far worse to be on the recieving end! Also, I use Huckleberry and find it is sometimes spot on and sometimes completely wrong, it's infuriating! I have resorted to using a combination of Huckleberry plus my own sanity check but I wish it was more reliable. Also (if anyone from Huckleberry is listening!?) as we move towards nap-dropping time I realise how useful it would be if it had a way to see the effects of potential future naps - like, when will bedtime happen if baby sleeps for 20 mins now, as I am usually too tired to get my head around it myself!

Meanwhile, big news in the hedgehog household - we just got a nearly 6 hr stretch!!!! I'm trying not to get too excited. I suspect she's catching up after cutting her first tooth, which resulted in a week or so of even worse than usual sleep. So we'll probably be back to usual practices tomorrow, but god I needed that. Sharing not to drive anyone nuts but to say there is hope, even for the most rubbish sleepers out there!

@Etherealhedgehog that's a really helpful website!

Wow 6 hours that's amazing! We got 3 last night which is the longest in a while.

Right - cot naps. Her cot isnt actually up because she is on my mattress. Should I be trying to get her down even tho she will need assistance to get to sleep that I then cant continue? Should I just wait and get decent length naps instead?
With DS we did gradual retreat at night and did moving naps because it meant he was properly rested, and then we did cot naps

@Etherealhedgehog 6 hours!!! I am so happy for you! Long may it last... There is hope for us all!

A busy night here with an hour and a half intermission from 4:30-6 in which I attempted every trick I have (including hiding under the duvet). From my 10 tog nest I observed DD has figured out how to roll over in her sleeping bag 🙈 but she won’t sleep on her front and she can’t get back 😬 Eventually persuaded her to feed and sleep, and then we both had a lie in which is basically illegal as far as I can tell from sleep tips websites. Oh well! The sun rises on another day and sleep deprivation hasn’t killed me yet.

@OhToBeASeahorse re. naps DD still naps either on me or in the pram. I have taken the view that I'd rather have her getting a decent amount of daytime sleep in order to give us the best possible chance of decent nights. Most things I have read suggest it is easier to teach independent sleep at bedtime first - so the plan is to tackle cot naps after we've somehow sorted night sleep. Also, on the occasions I have tried it has been basically impossible/would take ages to settle her to sleep in a cot at nap time, so I think we are going to jump straight from assisted napping to trying to teach independent settling, which is kind of what that article suggests. And it sounds like that's what worked with your son, which is reassuring.

@BerthaYoung I should add that the six hours lasted until 5.30 and I then could not put her down after that so it was an early one for me (am very impressed by your dd's ability to have a lie-in!) Crazy early mornings has been our most consistent and long-lasting sleep regression symptom. I took advantage of daylight savings and we got three glorious days when she actually woke up in her cot around 6.30 but already I can feel the mornings getting earlier again. It's infuriating, especially as we've now lost an hour of our evening!

Last night was the worst night so far, I just don't know what to do.

I'm making progress with his naps so I don't rock him anymore, albeit naps are 45 mins or less. Last night he was up and crying pretty much constantly. He just wouldn't settle no matter what I did. In the end I gave him calpol at 5am as I wasn't sure if he was in pain and he kind of settled after that even though he woke up every 45 mins. I must have fallen asleep for the first time at 5am.

I just can't see any improvement in his night sleep. I'm trying so hard and it's just mentally and physically draining

@ska86 could it be teething? If the Calpol settled him a bit then maybe? The last week or so has been our worst ever and part of me just assumed that her sleep was getting worse simply because it's been such a long time and I hadn't got her self-settling yet. Then lo and behold, yesterday we found a tooth poking through. Fingers crossed this particularly bad patch is short-lived for you! (Obviously, if it is teething that doesn't make it less exhausting but I definitely find it helpful to know that there has been a reason for recent crap nights that is out of my control and would have thrown off even the best of sleepers)

@SKA86 oh I'm sorry. It is brutal. I'd definitely try some calpol tonight just in case there is a tooth there.

It will get better, it really will

Hello everyone......

Can I please join your group??? I feel like I'm losing my fucking mind and all my mumma friends in real life are just totally not having the same experience!
My DS is nearly 6 months old and from birth his sleeping has never been good but since his regression, probably at least 10-12 weeks ago, has been totally shocking! We've had one, maybe two three hour stints, a handful of two and one 1/2 hour stints, but mostly 20, 35 or 45 min stints! It's fucking brutal! We have tried everything to do with naps and bedtime but it's getting out of control!
My husband went away for 4 nights a week or so ago (we normally take some sort of shifts) and I got less than an hour sleep a night.....on top of nearly 6 months of this I was ducking broken! He's going away again for work in three weeks and I just don't know how I'll survive 7 nights of literally no sleep!!!!
How long will this last???! Last night I was sick, from some dodgy food, and my husband again got less than an hour sleep as he was with him for the whole night whilst I lay on the bathroom floor! As soon as one of us is out of action it is totally impossible to get any sleep! We have a three year old as well so napping in day is put of the question!
He is the happiest, most delightful little baby ever but he just won't sleep! It was never this bad with number one and it we simply don't know what to do! Looking for some solidarity!!!!

Hi just wondering if any of you have seen the other side of this yet?

I'm afraid not - we are a week off 6 months. However the naps do seem to be getting better, she did 90 mins in her pram this morning then 2 hours at lunch in the sling (apart from being woken up by some idiot interrupting my husband and saying 'oh is your baby asleep? Is it a boy or a girl?' GO AWAY!!!
she's now just fallen asleep in the sling, bit late but never mind

We're a week over six months and not through it either. Am trying to work on a gentle approach to wean her off feeding to sleep but it's not going well - if we don't see progess in the next couple of weeks I think we're gonna try PUPD or gradual retreat. Having said that, we've had two nights recently that were much better than usual, so my inner-optimist wonders if we're turning a corner? On the other hand, today was the first day in ages that all naps lasted only 30 mins (and she refused a fourth nap, so bedtime is gonna be hell ). I think we are definitely running into lots of teething, which is making progress a lot harder than it might otherwise be

Oh gosh. I was hoping some one would say they'd seen the other side. My son is 16 weeks today but our nights got really bad at 13 weeks. Im not sure if this is the 4 mobth regression or sonething else? They'd only been reasonable from 8 weeks then things gradually got worse from 11 weeks. We average 5 get ups a night at the moment, sometimes more, but I have to put him next to me in bed after 4 am as otherwise he onlu manages 40 mins stretches fron then on and it's really hard to get him back in the cot without him waking. Its more like an hour next to me at that time and although I don't sleep well with him there it's better than getting up and down. I'm feeding to sleep which means he often has a nappy leaks in the night because of all the extra drinking.

This evening though he took forever to go down and woke with a startle when I put him in the cot and I managed to shush pat him back to sleep so I'll be interested to see if that makes any difference tonight. I used to try to follow the Baby Whisperer book and did a lot of shush patting at one point but it often got him worked up before drowsy and by the time I'd calmed him down with the shush pat he would fall asleep in my arms anyway. So I figured it was easier just to feed him to sleep. I sush patted him whilst he was calm this evening though and he fell asleep in the cot.

Before the night time madness we had a stage of very short naps so now I just let him nap on me or in the carrier or pushchair. It does mean no breaks for me though.

I found reading this thread reassuring that we're not alone but also terrifying to see how long this could go on for! I feel like we only had a couple of manageable weeks really before this hit and I'm gutted we didn't get this easy faze that everyone talks about at 3 months.

Any tips greatly appreciated!

Well he woke 40 mins after going to sleep with sush pat!

Yup, we've so far been in the regression for over 2 months and still going strong, unfortunately!

It's horrid, and no amount of reassurance helps when you're so sleep deprived and frustrated. Annoying thing is that I don't even think sleep associations have all that much to do with it anymore. Sometimes I think it just depends on the baby and get better over time. I've stopped rocking to sleep and he mostly falls asleep in the cot day and night, however he still wakes up constantly at night. There are other babies, including all my nephews and nieces who were fed to sleep, rocked, you name it, however they used to sleep through the night.

I think it's just something that will get better over time and requires masses of patience and perseverance. Of course it helps to have a good routine so that baby is less reliant on you to sleep but what can we do? We're already beating ourselves up about it

@LGBirmingham Sounds like the regression to me! Ours started at 3.5 months and we got a break of exactly two weeks between the end of feeding troubles/low supply and the start of crap sleep, so I feel you on the missing easy period!

No particular tips other than what is already on the thread but I just wanted to add that whilst we are very much still in it, we have definitely seen (slow!) improvement, so it's not stayed the same level of crap that it was at the beginning.

Our mornings used to be very much like yours - at some point between 3.30 and 5 she would wake up for a feed after which I could not put her down without waking, and she also spent a considerable portion of the wee hours WIDE awake. Over the last month my success rate for putting her down asleep is gradually improving - today she woke three times from feeds from 3.30am BUT after the last one she slept over an hour in her cot til 6.30 (ok, daylight savings helped with this as well). Probably sounds terrible to the parents of a good sleeper but compared to where we were a couple of months ago, it felt huge.

Similarly, she used to wake up and need settling multiple times in the couple of hours after bedtime, basically trashing our hopes of a relaxing evening. This has mostly stopped - she now wakes up in the evening once or not at all. As @ska86 says, these improvements have just come with time (though I suspect if we had managed to get her self-settling we would have seen more improvements/faster, though maybe not).

Also, most of what I've read suggests the regression 'should' last 2-6 weeks, and I do know quite a few people who had a few crap weeks and then it magically improved. At three weeks in, that could still be you. Then there are those of us who get stuck here for a much longer time. I don't know what the % breakdown is between the two groups but really hope for your sake you fall in to the first group! If not, at least you know you'll have lots of company on here!

@twinkletwinklestarz that does sound completely horrendous. Mine has never been that bad, thank god, so I'm afraid I don't have any great ideas, but just wanted to send some solidarity your way

(
The only thing I can think of, and I'm sure this will sound really irritating/you're already on it, is to ask whether you ever try just leaving him for a few mins to see what happens? Does he wake up straight to proper crying or do you sometimes get fussing first? Sometimes, if DD is fussing/moaning and I leave her to it, she is able to get herself back to sleep. Sometimes not. When I'm half asleep my instinct is usually to pick her up to make the noise stop (especially as we're in a flat and I feel bad for the neighbors) so I suspect I am not giving her enough chances to settle herself, and sometimes if I leave her it just results in her waking up more fully so she takes longer to settle So by no means a foolproof suggestion but maybe worth trying to leave him to it a bit more just to see what happens? (Depending what state he's in, I don't think this would work with proper crying)

Morning ladies!
It's so reassuring that I can relate to every single post on this thread!
Another week down and the improvements this week have been
She now can settle herself back to sleep from 7pm to 10pm
Naps in the pram have improved

The things that haven't improved
Naps at home - none existent
Still stirs regularly 1am to 3am
From 3am she will not settle... every night!! She ends up in our bed at that time as it's the only way she sleeps (a little)
Her feeding has increased overnight - especially from 3am 😭

I can't see any light at the end of the tunnel. I'm exhausted 😴

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/parenting/4189858-the-dreaded-4-month-sleep-regression?msgid=106187726

There's someone on this thread who has got through it without changing anything! Breastfeeding to sleep and transferring to cot and all naps in the sling.

Hi, I was wondering what you would all do in this situation:
4month old will have a 7oz bottle for bed at 8pm. Then will wake between 11pm-12am. Now I tend to make a bottle and change his nappy but he will only do 1oz then will go back to sleep but then he will wake regularly the rest of the night. After 3hrs I'll make him another bottle incase he's hungry but again will only have 1oz.

Am I cursing myself by feeding him when he first wakes?
He was previously sleeping with until 3:30 and on the odd occasion 5:30.

The whole not knowing what to do for the best is more frustrating than getting up every 10minutes.

Any advice appreciated!

Am joining this thread. My 17 week old (tomorrow) is in full on sleep regression territory. Won't nap for longer than 30mins. Used to do 2.5/3hrs in pram - no longer!!
Very unpredictable at night, too but it's the napping thats breaking me.
@firsttimemumdec2020 so we no longer feed if she wakes after just 3 hours. We use white noise, rocking of crib, usually she dozes off again. If we get to at least 4hrs after last sleep we feed again... can mean we sleep less has we have to be up rocking etc but she was drinking so little in day and filling up at night we decided to see if this works. Day 3 and she is drinking more in the day again... obvs slightly different to your one but maybe he needs white noise/rocking rather than feeding?

@Booksandtea84

Am joining this thread. My 17 week old (tomorrow) is in full on sleep regression territory. Won't nap for longer than 30mins. Used to do 2.5/3hrs in pram - no longer!! Very unpredictable at night, too but it's the napping thats breaking me. *@firsttimemumdec2020* so we no longer feed if she wakes after just 3 hours. We use white noise, rocking of crib, usually she dozes off again. If we get to at least 4hrs after last sleep we feed again... can mean we sleep less has we have to be up rocking etc but she was drinking so little in day and filling up at night we decided to see if this works. Day 3 and she is drinking more in the day again... obvs slightly different to your one but maybe he needs white noise/rocking rather than feeding?

Thank you for your advice! I will try that tonight

@FirstTimeMumDec2020 how did it go?
Ours fed at 2am, then woke again at 5am, I went down to prep bottle but by time I got up DH had rocked her back to sleep. He kept doing this bless him until 7am as she kept waking, but the rocking sent her back each time. She clearly wasn't hungry!