4-5 month olds sleep club, - come and join..........

[SnowlightMcKenzie]

Hiya,

There have been so many threads lately about babies who were beginning to sleep better, but suddenly hitting this regression to newborn hell.

So I thought I would start a support thread for us all to compete whinge about how little sleep we are all getting, and tips on how to cope.

Baby Starlight was up just twice last night, but the previous night it was 6 times, and because of that I kept putting off going to bed at all last night, so even though it wasn't too bad, I still had hardly any sleep

Well, i did say i'd spoken too soon - ds has just woken up screaming for the first time in 2 months - he has reliably slept 7 til 11 if at no other time in the day....still, as one of my friends says, this is just what has happened today. Indith, am so pleased for you - I guess it's always darkest before the storm?

Feralgirl, I do love NCSS, she is such a lovely woman, and it's such a relief to read such warm and empathetic words in relation to bringing up our children.

I was reading ' what mothers do especially when it looks like nothing' in a coffee shop today - was hard to keep tears out of my eyes!

Just finding this thread may have saved my sanity!! I have a 5 mth old DS2 who has gone from waking a couple of times a night to BF to waking every hour and a half to two hours and not being able to settle after each wake and feed. We also have a DS1 who is 18 months so I am shattered as I can't make up the sleep during the day, they are in cahoots to not sleep at the same time ever . I am going to go through and read this thread to convince myself we am not alone in this, no matter how DH and I might feel at 2.00am and 4.00am.... and I am going to dig out the NCSS. I couldn't do anything like CC, but if we don't do something I am going to spend the rest of my life in tears. Well, at least the next few months. So pleased to know you are all out there, though I wish that we were on a 'My five month old sleeps so well' thread.

Paddingtonblue, me too. Although if one existed then I would be sorely tempted to go and post abuse through

Staines NCSS also made me cry. The bit about CC had me wailing through guilt from the time that I tried it out of desperation. It's not just a mum thing though, DH cried too!

Well, last night was a bit of a revelation actually; I did Chulita's tactic of getting DS ready an hour earlier than we have been and it was amazing! He was asleep by 6.30 and was just beginning to wriggle at 11.00. He might have carried on sleeping but my boobs were hurting so I fed him. That's 4.5 hours! Woop woop!

He then slept in bed with me and woke a few times but not enough for me to register them and he only had a couple of very quick feeds and we slept in until 7am, hurrah!

Am feeling optimistic enough to start doing a sleep log again - I'm so lame, whenever it's going badly I stop writing it down.

Even though it's going so much better this week, there is still a little nagging voice at the back of my head saying "teeeeeething"!

Well done feral that is great.Dd will sometimes fall asleep on her back next to me now, but only if she feeds to sleep but even then her arms start flailing and she wakes, then won't feed back to sleep as she isn't hungry

Ok so that glorious night was a fluke, but last night not too bad and much better than she has been so we'll see. She had a couple of resettles before we went to bed then slept until 11 when I fed her (I am trying not to feed before then, obviously if she is actually hungry I would) I fell asleep as she was feeding then she woke me up at 12.30 so I topped her up and put her back on her tummy. She next fed at 3 although I had to resettle her a few times. Unfortunately she then slept pretty fitfully until 5.20 when she wouldn't go back to sleep as she was seriously stuffed up and couldn't breathe poor girl. I am considering the fact that she has not tried to have a party in the wee small hours as a major breakthrough! She has napped a fair bit so far today though which I am now wary of since we've had 2 days of hardly any naps and 2 good nights. Still my instinct tells me to be lead by her for naps.

for baby Indith being bunged up, but for a reasonable night's sleep though!

DS too thinks that the hours of 2am-4am are for playing. He lies there giggling to himself which is just weird.

The tactic that I've adopted now is just to completely ignore him. I don't want to sound too much like she-who-must-not-be-named but I've found the best way to stop him is to go for a total black-out so he can't see anything at all. I usually have a very dim night light on so I can see to feed without fiddling about so I turn that off, turn the white noise on and just lie there very still so he's got as total sensory deprivation as poss! I've found he usually settles within ten mins or so - or I go to sleep before he does. So long as he's not crying, I just leave him to it.

I wouldn't worry too much about naps either. My friend's 5mo DD sleeps for about an hour in total during the day - on a good day - and invariably sleeps right through the night.

i could kick my yesterday self - ds has napped a maximum of 40 minutes and i'm driving myself mental trying to get him to take one today...i preferred it when i denied any need for routine or naps....or sleep!

Hey fellow sufferers, how was last night?

staines I'm quite interested in getting the 'What Mothers Do......' book for DP to read . He seems to think I spend all my time lurking on MN

Well DS seems intent on lulling me into a false sense of security with a couple of reasonable nights with just 2 feeds, followed by horrendous nights like last night. He was awake every hour from 2am. I think I am being punished for procrastinating about the musical light show in his cot as he seemed to cry every time it stopped.

I will tackle that with earnest today and start with the naps. At least DP hasn't got work tomorrow if he does give us hell tonight.

hey there! WMD etc is great, though i'm still not sure that dh's would get it (sorry to any understanding dh's out there) as I bought it with the same intention! it is comforting, to see, in writing, exactly what it is that we do when it looks like nothing, as it's so hard to explain! also very moving to see emotions that i had thought only i was feeling (!) described so eloquently.

another cr@p night - ds seems to have decided that the 7-11 time off for mummy is ov-er!

dh has taken him out in the car now in a desperate attempt to get a nap out of him. am feeling dreadful - snappy with dh and like i'm not really appreciating ds - he's still so happy, how can he be on 10 hrs sleep a day when he's supposed to get 14 -15? also, i don't really feel entitled to moan as i see from here that i don't really have it that bad! so sorry for myself today!

feralgirl I just read what you wrote yesterday I'm chuffed it wasn't just a fluke with DD, I find it so odd that you put them in bed earlier and they sleep for longer...gutting that you have to wake up to feed though. I find some nights I lie awake waiting for the slightest noise so I can empty my boobs - there's no way I'm waking up to express!! DD's waking up twice a night now (ok, ok, I know that's nothing compared to what she was but I was enjoying my longer sleeps!) Gotta get her weighed this week and see if she's been growing

Chulita I mught have spoken too soon! I had DS settled by 6.30 again this evening and he woke at 9.00 refusing to be settled without a feed. Although to be fair, he was knackered by 6.30 after a very energetic bath so he obviously didn't fill his belly before going down.

Staines I'm so sorry you're having such an awful time. Fingers crossed for a good night tonight. It's amazing what one 'decent' night's sleep can do for your state of mind the next day. Our poor DHs; I keep trying to encourage mine to have a look at the dadsnet threads as I think he'd find some comrades!

And I've just got a copy of WMD, looks good, cheers for the suggestion.

Well, DS and I had a good run of a few nights with only two or three wakings then last night was a real let down (my own fault for tempting fate obviously). He woke at 10.30, 12.00, 1.30, 3.30, 4.45 and decided to wake for proper at 5.30 . But then today he's napped for England and done an hour in the morning, 2.5 hours at lunch and an hour on and off in his pushchair this afternoon.

How much napping is too much? My MiL was round and she keeps saying to me (over and over and over), "the more sleep they get, the more they want" but my HV said not to let him do more than 4 hours. Who knows?!

Argh feral that's a horrendous night . I think it's funny when I say dd was up a lot at night and they call it a blip, I call it a blip when she only wakes up once!
As for napping, let them sleep when they're tired or if they've been up for a while even if they look awake. Bollocks to more than 4 hours, on a good day dd sleeps two 2-2.5hr naps and one shorter one and she still goes to bed at 6pm. Some days she actually wakes up, has a bath/feed and goes back to bed and she's happy enough. As for 'not letting them sleep'...yea right!! Are you really going to wake a sleeping baby? or keep him up if he's had his 4 hour allocation? pish!!

Hi again, another rubbish night,but i was strangely comforted when i spoke to my bf yesterday - lives in oz, so we don't get to talk often - her response was 'he's hungry, he's hungry, he's hungry'. 'don't bother doing a diary, it won't last forever, and think again about introducing some solids....' it was much harder to pooh pooh her suggestions as she's just been through it and bf'ed to 16 months. so he's had two mouthfuls of banana this morning. it feels momentous!
the chapter i'm reading at the moment in WMD is all about being snappy to your dh. very apt!!!

My MIL is always telling me her 3 slept for two hours in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon. She hasn't shown me how she did it yet though! I'm ignoring routines again for a while and am just going to manage the best way that I can.

Cheers for support and advice guys, much appreciated. MiLs eh, who'd have 'em?!

I'm working really hard on self-settling for naps at the mo so today I left him in his bed when he still looked wide awake and went to have a shower. I just checked on him and he's fast asleep; he giggled a bit and then grumbled for a minute or two and silence ever since

We had a slightly better night last night, although he was awake for an hour from 4.45 - 5.45. I was beginning to get desperate and then he just popped off back to sleep, only fed a couple of times I think but it's all abit hazy.

Staines,what a coincidence. Bizarrely, I've not fully decided to introduce solids yet but just to start making DS aware of them so today I sat him on my lap while I was eating my toast. He took a swipe at it, played with it a bit and then smushed it into his mouth which was very exciting! I know it's not the ideal first food but we're planning on doing BLW anyway so I'm not too bothered. Although does that now mean I can't claim he was exclusively BF for the first 6mos?

He's also started rolling over this weekend so big times for the feralchild!

Hi fg, well, we had bil and his gf for lunch today - they were vociferous supporters of shoving something solid down his neck so i've just tried him on some avocado - recommended by sil as v high fat - and up came 20 minutes worth of breast feeding! so back to the drawing board....i am also comforting myself with the fact that he's 21 weeks tomorrow, so i only have 3 weeks to feel guilty about not doing it by the book! and he's in the 75th centile.

another thing i keep remind myself, he's absolutely lovely exactly as he is, so i should just stop wishing this time away. though saturday was a particularly bad day! and talking about it on here really, really helps.
thanks everyone - here's to a good night tonight!

I'm determined to say that baby Chulita was ebf for 6 months even though she does have a gnaw on stuff every now and then. I haven't found that she sleeps any better after a few spoons of carrot but maybe some would say I don't do it for long enough. Like you said feral, if they grab it and shove it in you may as well let them dribble all over it. I'd like to do BLW too...mainly cos the idea of purees...[bored to tears emoticon]
Last night she woke every 2hrs for no apparent reason; she wasn't really bothered with feeding and didn't want to settle back after her feeble 5 minute suck. Might have had something to do with the fact that DH had to get up for work at 5am and I really wanted her to be quiet so he could sleep...bearing in mind the night before she slept from 6pm til 2:30am and then again til 6...another one like that would have been amazing. What do you do with them when they're awake for no reason at all that you can work out but it's the middle of the night??

Hi All,

Just found this thread have not been on MN for a while - what a godsend my DS1 is now 20 weeks and seems to be worse than 8 weeks with the sleeping!! and he never sleeps past 6am.

Was wondering if any one has any advice?? he goes down after a feed at 7pm he wakes at 12am, he wakes again at about 4am most nights but does not seem to want a feed just to chat and play around should I try to feed him anyway? He is Breastfed and I have started to introduce baby rice and first vegi puries in the last couple of weeks once a day???

Oh also just moved him inro his own room!!

Any advice would be great

I might be just incredibly stubborn but my day doesn't start before 6am and it never has since having DD. If she fusses and wants to wake up I'll go in and re-settle (in other words feed cos nothing else even remotely works) but I won't talk to her or engage with her. Sometimes she'll be lying in her cot chatting/singing away for a while but she gets the hint. She doesn't cry so much at night now but she makes a lot of fuss with intermittent grunting and the occasional wail so just as I give up and throw the quilt back she's quiet...for another 10 mins then she'll fuss for about 30 secs then go quiet again...argh...gets very tedious!! But she's still absolutely gorgeous

with regards to night waking for play time, i freely admit that i feed, change, cuddle, and if there's still no sign of sleep, he goes back in the crib and the pillow goes over my head. dh goes in the spare room for the time being!!!

Hello again everyone, fell off the thread

well dd still doing her "bed at 7.30, up at 11.30 for a mammoth fartathon" thing. Anyone have any ideas what this might be? She sleeps perfectly happily for about 4 hours, then starts squriming and flailing about and then wakes herself up and will only be put back to sleep with boob. And is then generally in the bed next to me, but is soo bloody wriggly I get no sleep and have a dodgy back from ending up edging further across the bed every night as she right angles her legs into my tum. Will sleep if nipple is in her mouth, I've tried the NCSS pull-off a few times but she gets all cross and wakes up, no matter how asleep she might seem before then.

She also wakes up at about 5.30 and is super playful, I wouldn't mind but she's right next to me in the sidecar crib or in the bed and I can't sleep through it

re weaning, after being helpfully told by one of dh's colleagues that both her bpoys slept through after being put on solids at 4 months, we tried dd with a bit of pureed veg and she shoved it straight back out again, so we're at least able to tell people to sod off and stop saying weanweanwean, our baby's not ready for it yet. She grabbed hold of a bit of mango but it went in her mouth and straight back out again.

WMD is a fantastic book, bit of a bible in our house

Hello all, isn't it weird how all our babies are awake and up for a bit of a play at exactly the same time? I wondered whether it's a circadian rhythm thing because it's now summer. DS always wakes just as it's beginning to get light even though our room is v dark and he naps fine in much lighter conditions during the day. I did wonder whether the dawn chorus wakes him too.

Jezza my only tactic with the hour of wanting to play is to whack on the white noise and just ignore DS giggling and gurgling away. He seems to be getting better so I don't know if it's down to my ignoring or just him growing up a bit.

Jumpjockey, DS went through a phase of waking himself letting rip during one of his growth spurts a while back. I gave him a him a preventative lug of gripe water before bed for the duration of the spurt which seemed to sort it. Might be worth a go...

The NCSS pull-off has worked for me but I've had to be really persistent. I started just doing it during the day and it's def made a difference. I still let him comfort suck a bit before bed - ususally because I'm not paying attention - but quite often he'll let go and I won't even register.

I'm finding it sooo hard to resist the urge to start on solids; everyone I know with babies DS's age is shovelling food into them like anything. I read the MN advice on weaning last night and reminded myself of all the reasons to wait so I am determined to be patient.

And last night was our best for ages. He woke for a nuzzle at 10.45 but went straight back to sleep but was up at 12.30ish for a quick feed. He then slept until 4.30 when he had a big feed and then went back down again until 6.30. When I write it down it sounds a bit crap but I felt great this morning!

Maybe he'll start only waking once soon!

I think dd has caught ds's tummy bug, watery nappies, sicking up lots, constantly at the breast. I feel all empty and deflated as though I have no milk, like you do mid growth spurt. She slept most of the night but restlessly and superglued to my nipples so I didn't sleep much. Still, on the plus side that is 4, or is it 5?, nights without a party at 3am

A family friend told me yesterday that being awake in the wee small hours for a party is said to be a sign of intelligence

Hi all - fg - that sleep sounds beautiful! ds woke up to chat and play with his feet repeatedly last night, but gave in and slept from 5am til 8.30am and it makes allllll the difference! just one stretch of uninterrupted sleep makes me a new woman. am nervous for tonight - virtually no napping today - will i pay the price???
jumpjockey - i can't remember what my back used to feel like, it feels like a corkscrew now!

I think I might have found my new spiritual home and wanted to show appreciation. Ladies, I feel your pain! Chez moi, everything in the sleep department is completely pants... in fact our catalogue of sleep-related woes is impressive: multiple night wakings, early wakings (5am, oh god) AND catnapping!! Honestly, I would despair if only I had the energy.

Hi all

staines like the pillow over the head tactic!

DS had his 1st night without the musical light show thing and it went ok. I was expecting hell but he settled after a very short grumble at 7pm, DF at 11pm, woke at 1.30am but I left him and he resettled himself after about 5mins, woke for feed at 3.30am and then slept til 8am!!

Please please please don't be just a fluke!! I am on the verge of selling my soul to the devil for a decent nights sleep and to be able to start a "My DC sleeps 10 hours a night, til 10am on a Sunday and I have a headache from too much sleep!" thread.