4 month regression hell

[Newmama93]

Hi all, my babe is 4.5 months and the last 2 weeks he has been up every 45 minutes at night, I am dying! He only naps for 30 minutes at a time during the day. Last night he was up from 3am fussing and then ready for the day at 5am, today I am a wreck and I don’t even want to be around him. It’s horrible I feel short tempered when he is cranky, I don’t show it but I just feel irritated by the whining, I don’t want to be a short tempered mum and I’m really worried if this continues I won’t cope. My DH doesn’t get up to him at night and can’t because he is EBF and all he wants to do is feed every hour to get back to sleep. All the advice I get from people is sleep train but he just screams if I try and settle him in the cot so he ends up in bed with me from 1am.

He used to self settle from a newborn and now I’m feeding to sleep and he’s in the bed! Does this end?

Not helpful at all, but in the exact same position we ended up cosleeping and still do, over a year on.

It was the only way to get any sleep at all. If you do, do it safely. Google the safe sleep 7.

Solidarity.

Thank you! I would continue to do it but the thing is he still wakes all night while co sleeping because he wants to be fed back to sleep!

Can't you just kind of leave him on the breast in bed so he doesn't need to wake you up to get back to sleep?

Yeah, mine eventually got the hang of rooting for boob and latching on by himself so I can doze.

Not sure if four months is still young for that, though. Now he’s older he can contort himself anywhere for boob!

@Newmama93

Hi all, my babe is 4.5 months and the last 2 weeks he has been up every 45 minutes at night, I am dying! He only naps for 30 minutes at a time during the day. Last night he was up from 3am fussing and then ready for the day at 5am, today I am a wreck and I don’t even want to be around him. It’s horrible I feel short tempered when he is cranky, I don’t show it but I just feel irritated by the whining, I don’t want to be a short tempered mum and I’m really worried if this continues I won’t cope. My DH doesn’t get up to him at night and can’t because he is EBF and all he wants to do is feed every hour to get back to sleep. All the advice I get from people is sleep train but he just screams if I try and settle him in the cot so he ends up in bed with me from 1am.

He used to self settle from a newborn and now I’m feeding to sleep and he’s in the bed! Does this end?

Heya I was wondering if you had an update please? I’m in the exact same position and I’m at 3/4 weeks of these hourly wake ups.. very close to losing the plot now 😬😬 I’m desperate for some hope that the end is near or to learn what you did that helped? TIA ❤️

We struggled with the four month sleep regression really badly... I feel you! The only thing I can say is that it passed for us, and it will pass for you. Hang in there you're doing amazingly xx

We are still the same! Wish I could have had better news for you :(

I’ve just got a holistic sleep coach (no cry it out, pro co sleep and feed to sleep) so fingers crossed! I’m a mess at this point.

Would he feed from a bottle? If you express some milk into a bottle, you could at least get a little help from DH.

Some major solidarity here. My first was like this- I had mum friends who's baby was sleeping through and whilst everyone nodded at the "I'm so tired"excuses I made I don't think anyone understand the sheer mental and physical hell that waking every 45 mins results in. Firstly- this too will pass.

Secondly, my son was also breast fed and would only settle on the boob. I got myself into a mind set that I was the only person and that was the only way he would sleep but if you try to think rationally (hard with so little sleep) your babe can't possibly be hungry if feeding that frequently. So it's comfort that he's craving. Your partner needs to learn different ways to comfort and sooth your child to support you through this bit. There's lots of techniques. The one that worked for us with the side lying bum pat. You kind of roll baby onto side with one hand on shoulder and with other hand put their bottom rhythmically hard enough so it rocks them back and forth up and down the bed, the hand on the should stops them rolling front or back and stops them squirming away. I think there may be some you tube videos. It's very effectively. We put the beside me crib on par tees side of the bed so my son couldn't smell milk whilst this was happening. This helped us weather the storm.
Other tricks I learnt that helped with our situations are: awake/ asleep windows. Ideally you want your baby at some point in the day to do a longer than half hr sleep but faulting that if you try and make sure that they're not Awake for longer than an hr and a half or so. This gap obviously gets longer as they get older. As with everything it's just a guide and sometimes it just goes out the window and baby does their own thing. If I couldnt settle at home id go for a buggy walk (sometimes total failure) or I'd drive around the local area. An audio book for this was a sanity saver!
White noise (the sheep and hummy thing were not enough for us- we ended up with a 10 hr you tube clip of woman shushing ).
Proper black out in the room.
We swaddled for quite a long time (safe until they start to roll).

I hope some of those things help. I did end up subscribing to a sleep guide which gave me a lot of useful tips (as above). I felt I had to take some sort of positive action as I literally felt like I was dying. Good luck- it does get better. Also- baby one was so bad it put me off having a second for quite a while. Baby two is completely different and much more chilled about everything.

Sorry so many typos was feeding my baby and stupidly didn't re read before pressing send