Day/night confusion in a newborn

[Murtette]

Hello

I'm a first time mum with a 19 day old DD. She's sleeping pretty well - much better than I expected - but does seem a bit confused about day and night. Is there anything I can do to sort this out - or am I expecting too much at her age?

The main problem is that she tends to be wide awake between 11pm and 1am when both I and DP would rather she (and we) could sleep but sleeps very well during the day, especially the morning. At the moment, its not the end of the world as I'm cat napping during the day when she sleeps but I would prefer to move her schedule back a few hours so that she's wide awake during the early part of the evening. Any suggestions?

Whilst we're not in any sort of routine at all at this stage, her day tends to go something like this:

1am - 1.45am feed (she's breast feeding on demand and feeding well but tends to fall alseep during each and every feed so it can take a while); sleep until 4/4.30 when she has another feed and then sleeps until 8ish when she has another feed and then tends to be awake for an hour or so before sleeping until 11ish when she feeds and then sleeps until 1.30ish when she has a monster feed (both breasts, takes a good hour); sleeps for half an hour or so, then wakes for an hour or so and then sleeps again until 5ish when she cluster feeds (I think - unless she's just being lazy - she has short burst of feeding interrupted by naps of 15 mins or so) for a couple of hours, sleeps for an hour and then cluster feeds for another couple of hours which brings us to 11pm when she is wide awake and looking for entertainment for a couple of hours. We've tried to rock, pat, push (in the pram) her to sleep in a darkened room during this period but to no avail. All she wants to do is party!

Any suggestions appreciated.

Thanks

welcome to parenthood!Not sure what you were expecting of your baby but your account sounds about normal!
Babies have no concept of day or night when newborn and it will be some time before they do and only at first when you've developed a routine, which again is too much to expect at this stage.
She'll soon settle into more of a routine as she gets older and recognises darkness as being sleep time and light as being day.

She is very young, so don't panic! I was very keen to get my DTs (now 3) to realise that night time is for sleeping, so from very early on, we made a distinction between day and night by putting them upstairs at about 7, even though it meant I was going up to feed. When they were upstairs, we kept the lighting dim, and everything very quiet and calm, and only gave them attention when I was feeding. During the day, they were downstairs, and on playmats etc and then when they were a bit older, they went upstairs for all naps too.

I depends very much on how you want to do things - I was very keen to get the twins into a routine, and that worked well for us. It is early days though.