Roughly how many hours in 24 does/did your 8-10 week old sleep?

[hopefully]

DS has been struggling to sleep, and I'm beginning to think it's more to do with over tiredness than other problems.

I can 'force' him to sleep in the pram during the day, and I'm just wondering how much sleep I should 'make' him have in order to ensure he's well rested but still needs some sleep during the night.

At the moment he naps for about 3-4 hours between waking at 7:30am and beginning bath and bed routine at 5pm. He is then hugely unsettled but usually manages a couple of hours somewhere before his 10:30pm feed. He then gets another 3 hours (approx) before his middle of the night feed, and another 3 hours afterwards (he is a disaster to settle after these feeds).

This means he is managing 14 hours on a good day, but really more like 10-12 hours decent sleep and perhaps another hour or two catnapping here and there.

lots !

mine used to get tired within max of 2 hours of being awake - and if I didn't catch it in time and get them back to bed then they were a nightmare of grizzliness (I learnt this the hard way with DS1 who sometimes stayed awake for 8-10 hours at a stretch at the at age !).

I usually manage to get DS to sleep by the 2 hour mark (so he's clearly tired), it's getting him to stay that way that's impossible. If he's held he wakes when I move a muscle, if he's in the cot he jerks himself awake (despite swaddling).

have you tried white noise ? Like a radio not tuned in - that often helps.

And maybe try putting him to be say 10 minutes earlier than you normally would. Once mine got to the yawning stage they were often overtired and didn't sleep as well.

And set the scene - so in a sleeping bag or in a cot, curtains drawn etc

I was lucky though - as long as they weren't overtired - they were pretty bomb proof once they were alseep and could sleep through most things - (with the twins even one screaming his head off next to him didn't wake the other - thankful for small mercies !!).

just trying to think back that far - at that age mine were something like

up at 6ish, sleep 8ish-10.30ish, sleep 12.30ish-3ish, sleep 5ish-6ish, mad cluster feed all evening - bed about 9ish - with night feeds about midnight and 3ish.

they would sleep usually 2.5 - 3 hours. Gradually the bed time got earlier so that they went to bed at 8ish, then 7ish and finally about 6ish I think at about probably 6 months.

thanks throckenholt. DS is also v good when he finally gets into a deep sleep, he's been struggling to get into one though.

will try the white noise and earlier sleeps, already do wind down routine.

he's managed a massive sleep today, so maybe he'll get a bit on track again.

hope so

just believe it will get better.

Erm.... bout the same as yours - much less than everyone else is telling you a) he should be b) their children did