Help!! FTM - 13 week is this a sleep regression?!

[HRF2022]

Hi everyone, just looking for a bit of advice really - I’m a FTM and very much muddling through at the moment!

DD was what I considered an ‘average’ baby in terms of sleep up until 6 weeks, when she suddenly turned into a great sleeper overnight. Started with 6-8 hour stints, and we had then got to the point she would do 7pm-7am with one feed at 5am from around 8 weeks until very recently. She was combi fed but is now exclusively on formula in a bottle. Her day time sleeps were always a battle but with a bit of perseverance we got her to have around 4-5 hours of naps during the day and never let her stay awake beyond wake window - she suffers terribly if she’s over tired!

Her night time sleep seems to have changed overnight once she hit 13 weeks. She goes down reasonably easy at bedtime, drowsy but awake in her Moses basket with her dummy. However, after an hour or so she becomes unsettled, spitting out her dummy and needing us to put it back in to settle her. This continues hourly - if not more - until the morning.

Initially we thought she might be hungry, so started offering a feed at 2am as well as 5am, but this doesn’t seem to solve the problem. I am of course happy to feed on demand and would never deny her food if she’s hungry - but how do I know when she is hungry if she wakes every hour?! Before it was easy because she would only wake once, at roughly the same time each night (5am) and would eat and go straight back after. When offering two feeds, she had roughly about the same amount she would have from that one feed anyway. I would rather not get in the habit of doing more night feeds if we don’t need to. I think I rather stupidly expected her sleep to get better as she came out of the 4th trimester!

I’m also happy to ride it out if that is what is needed, myself and DH take it in terms to sleep next to her basket and put her dummy back in for her. However I have read conflicting advice about teaching them to self sooth at this stage, are we making things worse for ourselves by putting her dummy back in? Should we be trying to wean her off it? I do wonder if it is causing issues as it falls out her mouth in the night and then she can’t seem to get back to sleep without it. We currently only use dummies for naps and sleeps.

Does this sound like potentially the 4 month regression? It’s such a drastic change overnight that we can’t work out what has happened to our lovely sleeper!

Any advice would be great, like I say I don’t mind riding it out and I understand babies sleep changes all the time, I'm just not sure if we should be doing something to help her through this. One book I read advised that until we teach her to self sooth with no props (ie the dummy) this will not get better , which is not ideal as we are getting pretty tired from all the disrupted sleep!

Thank you x

I am in the exact same position as you with my 4 month old!!!! I have even just made a post about it! He was a good ish sleeper with the same wake to feed pattern and about 13 weeks it all went to pot waking up more and more and we keep inserting the dummy. I’m sorry I’m not going to give you any advice here but I’m totally in the same predicament and it’s 4 weeks+ in to this cycle.. I keep thinking should I ditch the dummy because how will he ever self soothe if I keep putting it in.. but he just can’t settle without it. Does your little one suck her hands at all? I was hoping maybe that would help him self soothe but I don’t know if it’s a bad idea to encourage that. Being a mum is so confusing! Sending love and solidarity. ❤️

So this was me up until 1 week ago. I made the decision to go cold turkey on the dummy and it made a significant difference overnight! She's gone back to 12hrs with just one feed. Ditch the dummy - I promise it's worth the short term pain!

@smooshraspberry how did you go about ditching the dummy? I literally have no idea how my son would go to sleep without it?! It calms him down and he uses it to fall asleep. I feel like he would just wait without it but I do agree for us it probably needs to go. Sorry OP jumping on your post and making it about me lol! X

Honestly, I just decided (after a week of shit sleep) that enough was enough. I literally just didn't give it to her at night time. However, I did it on the expectation that we would have a rough few days whilst she got used to life without it, but the outcome would be worth it. As it turned out (I realise it's not so easy for some) that she was completely fine. I've always put her down awake anyway, so I just lay with her with my hand on her chest until she fell asleep that night. She only woke once. The night after, she just took herself off to sleep and has done ever since. She wakes up once, if that. I wanted to nip the sleep regression in the bud and it seems to have worked. However, I will say that she is harder to settle for her day time naps (ie I used to stick her in the sling, stick the dummy in and she'd go straight off. Now we have a few minutes of fighting it instead).
They say it's easiest to remove before 6 months or after 2 years.
Just pick a few days where you could cope with a little less sleep at night (eg, you have nothing planned for the day time), acknowledge that you may have a shit few nights where it takes a while to get them down and just go for it! Will be worth it I promise. It did the trick for both of mine. Good luck x

@Maisie2019 So sorry to hear you are having the same issues! But I'm glad to hear we are not the only ones - the night time wakings are starting to drive me mad! Yes DD does suck her hands, initially we were quite anti this as we had heard that a dummy is easier to remove than stopping thumb sucking, but I think now we are desperate enough to just let her do it! She was sleeping in a Love to Dream swaddle with her hands enclosed, but we need to transition her out of that anyway so I'm hoping perhaps with her hands out that might help things? How have the last few days been for you?

@smooshraspberry thank you so much for the advice! Did you go cold turkey with the dummy in the daytime also? After a particularly bad night last night I tried to put DD down for her nap this morning without it, but she ended up in such a state I'm afraid I buckled rather quickly. The day time naps are always tricky for us because DD isn't great at all at going to sleep in the day and needs lots of help, the night has always been easier for us. I worry if I leave her to cry in the day she will get in such a state she can't nap! Annoyingly she used to be a brilliant self soother at night, but because we introduced a dummy for the day time sleeps we foolishly started giving it to her at night too and have created all these problems for ourselves!

Hi I realise this is an old post but my 13 week old is exactly the same waking hourly needing to be resettled. Was just wondering how you got through it 🥴

@Tommymummyft we did indeed ditch the dummy in the end! I think after this post we took a good few weeks of terrible sleep before we realised something had to change as wasn’t getting better on his own. We ended up taking away his dummy at night time when he was around 5 months and we did some verrrry gentle sleep training. We lay next to him sshhing and patting until he would drift off and would do the same if he woke at night. Honestly took a week or two but was the best thing ever. He’s 20 months now and asks for his bed and goes to sleep / back to sleep with no assistance (unless he’s unwell or something of course). For us, it didn’t get better on its own like people said it would so we had to do something to get him to figure out going back to sleep on his own x