My DS is 7 weeks old. He gets really overtired most evenings and then can't get to sleep for hours. Any tips on how to manage this better?
On a perfect day, he falls asleep around 7pm, then wakes at around 10.30pm, 1.30am and 5am overnight, before waking up for the day at around 6.30am. He's breastfed but DH gives him the 1.30am feed using expressed milk.
On a bad day, he gets tired and sleepy, feeds as if he is going to sleep at 7pm, but just before dropping off wakes up again. He then gets more and more tired, and as we go through repeated cycles of soothing (feeding, snuggling and sucking finger(refuses dummy), walking/swaying and singing, walking in baby carrier) he starts staring at shadows and patterns on the walls, and then wakes himself up to stare at something else every time he gets close to dropping off. Eventually, he is totally exhausted, screaming in distress and sometimes hungry but too upset to properly latch and feed.
Sometimes taking him for a car ride (at 11pm, yay!) allows him to sleep enough to either feed calmly and sleep or be rocked to sleep. But not always. Last night he didn't properly settle until after midnight. And that was after 3 car rides, 3 long feeds and finally a bottle of formula milk because he randomly refused to drink the expressed milk.
What can we do to help him sleep when he is tired and not get so overtired in the first place? Or is this just a phase that we need to get through?
One thing that could be an issue is that he sleeps in the living room until the 1.30 feed. DH stays with him and then brings him to our room, where he sleeps in a next-to-me style bedside cot. Would not spending the whole night on his cot affect his ability to settle/realise that it is sleep time? We also have the light on in the living room in the evening, although even if we didn't it is still daylight until about 8.30pm.
I'd love to have a more consistent "bedtime routine" but fundamentally I just want him to be able to get to sleep at night without a chaotic evening and hours of distress.