11 week old waking every 3 hours

[Brócoli]

My 11 week old is formula fed and has gone from going 5/6 hour stretches at night to 2:.5/3 hours. This has been going on for about 3/4 weeks now. We changed formula to a comfort blend but has since changed to an organic blend as we did not see any improvement in his symptoms. He has been colicy from about 2 weeks and we have found the evenings very hard. It is only in the last few days that this has started to get better.

I know 3 hour wakings are normal for this age but we just cannot work out why he has stopped sleeping for longer. He pretty much wakes up at 3 hours on the dot! We have the same sleep environment (swaddle, white noise, red light, black out blinds). When he wakes, the only way he’ll soothe is by feeding and he will often take a full bottle every 3 hours.

He has always struggled with day time naps as he is definitely a FOMO baby but I am trying my hardest to get him to sleep (even for 30 mins) at the end of his wake windows.

any advice on how to get him to stretch his feedings at night would be amazing, I am so tired :(

He's probably having a development leap so you might start to see it calm down again. Though you're right around the corner from 4 months sleep regression so probably best to just go with it. Believe me I empathise, my little one was the worst sleeper in the first year

At 11 week this is pretty normal. They will often go through developmental leaps and growth spurts which can disrupt and change their sleep, and there’s a number of regressions they go through. Sleep often changes and they’ll go through periods of sleeping well and sleeping less well.

I’m not sure there is much you can do. As you say it’s very normal and you were so lucky to get so long before. It can take months to see improvement and its often not something you are doing

Sounds like my baby. Sometimes he can do 5-7 hours the first stretch but then often goes back to every 3 hours on hungry days (he is just over 4 months now) .

Unfortunately not much solid advice other then it changes pretty much week by week for us.

Is he getting enough calories in the day??

When we went through nap refusal I found laying him on his side in the crib helped to fall off. After 15 minutes when in a deep sleep I moved him onto his back.

Something that helped me during the baby sleep years was to remember that sleep progression is not linear for babies it’s doesn’t just gradually get better and better , it goes backwards , forwards , sideways - you name it ! And above all else there is rarely anything you can ‘do’ about it , as exhausting as it is accepting this is how it is , gathering a good support network around you and hunkering down in the knowledge they will
sleep consistently one day is the best you
can do .
i wasted many hours disparing over it with my first two , by number three I rolled with the punches and the overall experience whilst still bone numbingly tiring was mentally more manageable.

Yes I think the worst thing you can do is think 'but he was previously doing x'.
If you're struggling with tiredness, could your partner do the stretch from saying 9pm-1, and you go to bed early? Then you do 1- morning ?

It's normal, he's no longer a newborn

Also sleep isn't linear, sometimes kids sleep through then get to 2 and start waking.

3 hourly wakes is normal and IMO although hard it is actually good and healthy at this age, waking frequently is preventive of SIDS

It is bloody hard though. My daughter was waking every hour at this age, it was very hard

Thank you, I knew it was probably a development stage but it is reassuring to hear it from others!

We’ve thought about this! Might make the wake ups more manageable! It’s so easy to look back on nights that went well and try to recreate them, even though baby decides what will happen! Thank you

Yes unfortunately we went through the same. We had very long overnight sleep spells around 10-12 weeks (after horrendous early weeks) and thought we'd cracked this sleep business. Ha, what a fool I was - by about 14 weeks, sleep regression hit hard and lasted until 6 months 😭. At its worst baby was waking every 20mins all night long. But by 6-6.5 months all was good again (except I'd probably aged about 10 years 😂). And he's been a great sleeper ever since. Hang in there!