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Baby fighting sleep / early starts

3 replies

Hatepickingusernames83 · 28/01/2023 08:53

My 20 weeks DS has become impossible to put to sleep for both day and night time sleeps for the last 3 weeks. Day time naps are now a daily battle as he refuses the dummy, won’t feed to sleep in the day and screams when rocked. It takes me often an hour of rocking to get a 30 min nap. He also now hates the pram and screams whenever he is put in there awake which makes trips outside stressful fun.

Nightsleep we start routing of bath, pjs, sleeping bag, book, feed etc at 7ish with the hopes he’ll be asleep by 8. Previously I could put him down awake and give him dummy and white noise and with some gentle encouragement from me he’s be asleep by 10-15 mins. Any wake ups at night (every 2-3hrs) would be quick feed and back to bed. Now it’s a battle again as he won’t go down awake anymore as refuses dummy and hates if I try to settle him through patting / shhhing / stroking face etc. He just bats my hands away. If I get him to fall asleep on boob he often just wakes up when put down so it often takes me 2hrs to get him into his cot. He then does the usual 2-3hrs but after 3am it then becomes impossible to get him into the cot and he’s just wide awake and refusing sleep again thrashing around and farting. Have I broken my son? Literally no clue what’s changed and where to even begin as I know we can’t do gentle sleep training until 6 months. Just getting exhausted and frustrated and starting to dread each nap. Help!

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
Dippyeggz · 28/01/2023 09:27

4 month sleep regression. It's nothing you've done

Hatepickingusernames83 · 28/01/2023 10:58

Thanks @Dippyeggz. I thought the 4 month sleep regression was more frequent night wakings? He is still (touch wood) sleeping a longish first stint (can go up to 5hrs v rarely), it’s just once it’s past 3am it goes to pot. Day naps have got noticeable shorter though I guess as we used to always get 1hr+ and now they are between 30-40mins.

Does it just improve on its own?

OP posts:
Dippyeggz · 28/01/2023 11:03

Fighting sleep and short naps sounds like it esp given his age, I think it can present differently in different babies. You can tell because before the regression they go into light sleep first (so 20mins of fidgeting etc before you get thY deep sleep), but i the regression it switches to deep sleep first.

You can wait it out but really he only way to get good sleep from now is to help him to sleep independently. It can be a rough few weeks. Have a look online, lots of info about strategies available

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