My DS who is 12 weeks today (14 weeks based on due date, yes.. he was very late) has had a horrible cold and chesty cough since Monday. Throughout the week his sleep has worsened and worsened to the point of hourly wake ups last night. This is despite the cold seemingly getting slowly better! He has calpol and vapour plug before bed to ensure no pain from the miserable cold.
He is EBF and our usual routine is a short amount of tummy time, book, bath, boob and bed (aiming between 7pm/8pm). With his last feed at night I try and ensure he takes 20+ minutes on each boob to fill him up. I then stand up and gently hold/rock him for 20 minutes before putting down in next to me cot. He then would sleep to around 11pm/12am, 2am/3am and 4am/5am and then up for the day at 7am. Wake ups in the night involve feeding to sleep (about 10 minutes of proper feeding) and waiting 20 minutes to transfer him back to cot. Before this cold, I was working on reducing the waiting time by a minute each night, we got down to 14 minutes before this all kicked off. He wears a love to dream arms up swaddle and we use white noise. A dummy occasionally works, but not consistently and he has trouble keeping it in before he falls asleep.
Last night after the third night of multipleeeeee wake ups I gave up at 1am and plonked him in bed with us and cuddled or boobed him to sleep whenever he stirred awake. He was not coughing himself awake or anything, just stirring and then getting frustrated at not being asleep. I am not a fan of co-sleeping and was "on guard" all night, but did doze a bit after 4am. I guess I can continue to do this if it is the only solution, but would want to move away from it ASAP.
In people's experience, does this sound like the usual experience with a cold...or are we at the 4 month sleep regression a bit early? I feel like his sleep has slowly been disintegrating since after Xmas. Daytime naps are all contact, sling or pram naps around 45 minutes (started after xmas) in length, they can go longer if he is quite aggressively shushed and cuddled through the wake up. I try everyday to get him to nap in his cot for the first nap of the day, sometimes it works for about 20-ish minutes, but more often it doesn't.
Shush patting in cot doesn't work, he gets more and more irate until screaming. He can't self settle himself to sleep either, just thrashes around until screaming. We do leave him a short amount of time when he stirs awake, but it inevitably just dissolves into crying with tears. He has taken to sucking his hands a lot during the day, so wondering if we should leave his arms out at night, but wary of trying too much at once?
Sorry for the long rambling post, I think I have had less than 8 hours sleep since Thursday night and I have the grim cold too. Just looking for any tips and/or solidarity that this will pass! 😅