Night Wakings

[HurlyBurlyyy]

FTM here and feeling a bit clueless.

5mo goes to sleep about 7:30 and will sleep through til about 3am but then just will not go back down in her cot. She’s BF so I feed her when she wakes (haven’t had any luck soothing in other ways) and she’ll fall asleep on me but wakes when I transfer her. Only solution so far has been bringing her in with me which I don’t mind occasionally but not every night.

Am I doing something wrong? I put her down fully awake at bedtime and she drops off herself but that doesn’t seem to work on the night wakings, she just gets upset. Do I keep persisting? She’s on 3 naps a day on average if that’s relevant, last one ends about 3 hours before bed - much more than that and she’s overtired.

Thanks

When you put her down at bedtime, what do you do get her to sleep?

You need several 'layers' of help you give. There will always be times when extra help is needed. For example at bedtime the body's natural pressure to sleep is greatest. But in the early hours of the morning it is lowest, having just woken up from a big chunk of sleep. Even though more sleep is needed, it's harder for baby to get back to sleep because the pressure to sleep is lower. So you need to make up for that by offering extra layers of help to sleep.

You're current extra layer seems to be cosleeping. You could do with those extra layers being in-cot settling if you are wanting independant sleep.

I used a sidecar cot (full sized cot with one side removed). My layers of extra help were:

• Dummy and hand on chest
• Feed then dummy and hand on chest
• Feed, dummy, hand on chest, then move my torso into the cot and cuddle close.
• Feed, dummy, cuddle close, hand on chest and patting
• Feed, dummy, cuddle close, hand on chest patting, shushing
• Feed, dummy, cuddle close, shushing, face tickle
• Sit up, give extra feed/wind, dummy and rocking/cuddle until calm, then put down and start again. Repeat the whole cycle over and over.

Thanks for replying @FATEdestiny!

That makes sense, when she goes down at night we have a full bath/story/feed routine to wind down.

We don’t use a dummy currently, do you think it’s worth introducing one?

You've left it very late to introduce a dummy and it might be too late to get one accepted. Worth a try though. Without the ability to suck to sleep, there is likely to be crying to get baby sleeping independently (probably lots of)