Is my 6 month olds sleep ruined?

[MummytoS2023]

Apologies for the long post!

My 6 month old has always been a good sleeper but this changed at 5 months. My DD was sleeping 6 to 7 hour stretches at 3 weeks old and by 2 months was consistently sleeping 10 to 11 hours at night without waking for a feed (I do realise that we were extremely lucky with this and this is not the case for most parents). She did occasionally wake in the night but would fall back to sleep independently.

Since hitting 5 months she will wake 4 or 5 times a night (sometimes more). Last night she was up 4 times between 10:30pm and 1:30pm, I took her back into our room then but she was still up another 3 times between 1:30 and 5am.

Most of the time when I pick her up she will just fall back to sleep straight away, if not then I will offer her milk. She will normally only have a tiny bit and then go back to sleep so I don't think it's hunger related.
We moved her into her own room at 6 months to see if this would help but the waking has remained the same.

For naps and at bedtime she is unable to fall asleep independently (unless in the car or pram) although prior to 5 months she was able to settle herself back to sleep in the night and would also fall asleep by herself for the first nap of the day but she can no longer do this.

She has been teething on and off since 4 months and initially I thought this was the cause of the wakings but it's been about 6 weeks now and her sleep has remained the same (still waiting for teeth to come through)

Like I said I realise we were extremely lucky to have such good sleep up until 5 months, however I am wondering if this is now the new normal? Does anyone have any tips to help with getting her sleep back to what it was or is it just a case of waiting it out? Does anyone have any experience of anything similar, I guess what I want to know is will her sleep return to what it was?

Since she turned 5 months we have had 3 nights where it looked like her sleep had gone back to normal and she slept for 10 hours straight but these were one off random days, there had been nothing different with her routine

Any advice or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Hello

My DD was similar, very good sleeper until 4 months old - we had to wake her to feed in the early days then she slept through. 4 month sleep regression hit and sleep gradually got worse and by 7 months she was waking 4/5 times a night.
At 8 months she suddenly started sleeping better again - she had 1 week where she only woke once a night, then just started sleeping through again.
So hopefully your DD will revert back too! I did stop breastfeeding completely at 8 months so that may have contributed, but I don’t think she was waking for hunger anyway and so didn’t feed her at every wake up anyway so it may just be coincidental. Other than that didn’t do anything differently!

Thanks Natpat. It's nice to know someone else experienced this and reassuring that sleep did go back to normal eventually

Our DD was the same, we had to wake her for feeds when she was a newborn or she would just sleep through.

Over the last 3 or 4 days her sleep has got a lot better, waking twice a night and only once last night. So fingers crossed we get back to sleeping through the night in the next couple of months.

Wow, I feel like I could have wrote that myself. Currently going through this and finding it very hard.
The only thing settling my DD in the night is feeding. But now I feel she is waking out of habit to feed. But she screams terribly if we don’t. I’m hoping it’s just a phase but I feel like it’s going on forever. And I feel pretty helpless.

spelling mistake edited

It's so hard isn't it, especially when they've been a really good sleeper and then suddenly it changes and you can't figure out why

Funnily enough, since I posted this DD has been sleeping much better, only waking up once or twice a night compared to the 5 or 6 times she had been. I even got one night where she slept through 10 hours

When the night wakings first started I did have to feed DD and was worried this would turn become a habit as she had been sleeping through without milk before this. I think I had about a week to 10 days where I was having to feed her at every wake up but then it stopped, I assumed she was maybe having a growth spurt

I genuinely was soooo cocky that we'd missed the 4 month regression (we were really similar to your sleeping even down to the 10-11 hour stretches) and then BAM 5.5 months was just downhill.

It is most definitely not you or anything you've done, it is (annoyingly) one of those things. Some come out of it relatively quickly - I'm part of a due date group and there were a few that went through it at the same time who righted themselves, mine was not one of those 🤣 I actually thought she was trying to kill me at times. You CAN do this and one day (hopefully soon) you will sleep again. Sending lots of love x

Also on the night feeding becoming a habit thing, in my case it definitely didn't. I just went with it as and when she needed it and it didn't become a set thing - growth spurts/developmental leap/teething definitely saw more of these x

@daisyelle thank you, it's nice to know other people have experienced similar things. I wrote this post after a particularly bad night! But since then things have improved, I just remind myself that everything is a phase and they change so quickly