Please Help! Seeking advice, 3 week old won't sleep during day at all

[sushimama23]

Hi there,

I'm a new mum of a beautiful girl who's only 3 weeks and 4 days old but my anxiety is through the roof due to her not napping at all during the day. She's EBF and she falls asleep on the breast which is the only time she tries to sleep (sometimes only a minute or so) despite my best efforts to keep her awake to nurse on both and get burped. She only poops once a day and i think she has mild reflux as she brings up whole feeds on some days, not projectile though. Her sleep habits have gotten progressively worse as the days go on and I know she's still so little so she won't have a routine, she just won't sleep or be put down. She doesn't seem to like being swaddled so we use sleep bags, not tried dummies yet but going to try that to see if the sucking reflex helps to calm her. She does sleep at night but only for a couple of hours, she grunts and fusses a lot which makes me think she's uncomfortable, she's extremely loud and frantic at times.

I am feeling quite anxious about all of these things, maybe none are unusual but I find myself googling frantically, trying to find some solution to help her settle as I know she's just so tired, as are we!

I'm just really starting to feel like I'm losing myself confidence with her and reading her cues, I find I'm all over the place.

I hope someone can offer some guidance or reassurance that maybe this is quite common or maybe I just need to chill out, I really don't know.

Does she sleep on you if you stay seated? Or if you go for a walk with her in a pram?

She does sleep in her pram actually and does seem to settle more if she's on me or my partner...I guess I'm more worried if she only sleeps on us then that might transfer to nighttime sleeps as well. My confidence is very low atm, unsure if I'm doing the right things...

I remember feeling exactly like you did, first baby and very unsure of myself and what I should be doing. I googled a lot, went on forums and to a lot of baby groups. I learned that at this age especially, baby just wants to be on or close to you in order to sleep. Mine napped a lot whilst breastfeeding, sometimes I was able to wind her whilst still asleep. I spent a lot of time just feeding feeding feeding on and off and any time their eyes are closed during that definitely counts. My little boy would not be put down to sleep on a surface during the day at all, but did sleep OK in the next to me cot at night after a few weeks of trying. I found getting a sling really helped, we would go for walks outside to help him get used to daylight, or I could just get things done at home a bit more. The motion really helped as they are used to being in your tummy. We also did a lot of pram walks and occasional short car rides to groups or visit people. As a result my little boy can now nap well in any of those places, which helps later on. When we got to around 12 weeks I would try occasionally putting him down asleep or sleepy somewhere and he tolerated that for 15-30mins max. Yes all that holding did mean that later on it was harder to get him to nap whilst not on me, but that was OK, I loved our cuddle naps and by 7 months he was napping in his cot as well as out and about. Its what he wanted in that moment and for me it was OK to give that. Its absolutely normal for baby to only want to sleep on you, youre warm and comforting, they can barely see. Babies are so much louder when asleep than I realised! Have a look into reflux if it really seems like baby is uncomfortable a lot of the time. Keeping them upright after a feed can help, even just asleep on your chest etc. For us it just passed. I also worked out that they were not bringing up anywhere near as much as I assumed, but if yours is bringing up whole feeds it may be worth mentioning to your HV.