6 mo sleeping disaster...

[Flowerface]

So DD is 6 mo and an abysmal sleeper. During the day we have to take her for walks in the pushchair to get her to sleep, which we do a after breakfast and lunch.

She has a bedtime routine, which I am afraid to say involves me feeding her to sleep, but our problems are twofold:

She has stopped feeding to sleep. She now feeds, gibbers, cries, feeds...etc etc... until totally overtired when she SCREAMS blue murder. Last night she took over three hours to settle.

She wakes about four times a night for feeds, and wakes up finally at about 5am (though our curtains are rubbish so this could be why).

I am at the end of my tether, really. She becomes so apoplectic with fury if she doesn't get what she wants (e.g. a bosom, entertainment....) that we are convinced that she must be in terrible pain. I have left her to cry once - she cried for three hours. I can't stand it and our house isn't big enough to escape it.

I just feel totally desperate about the whole thing. She has always been a hopeless sleeper and was a really really screamy baby at under three months (>12 hours a day, at one stage). I have some things arranged for the future which involve being away for a night and can't possibly imagine how this could work for poor DP...

Any advice would be really gratefully received. I don't want to get tough, but I fear that soon I'll have no choice. Don't know if it'll even work though...

Sorry for the ramble...

What time do you put her to bed? It sounds like she's massively overtired hence the screaming and early wake up.

I'd suggest:

• early bedtime (try half 6 at first) after a shortish routine;
• get some black out blinds;
• nap routine.

For the nap routine, the morning nap is the easiest one to introduce and the next two should follow from there. Get her sleeping about 60/90 mins after she wakes up (or look for tired signs). It might even be less than that. If you keep her up to long in the morning, it puts her in a bad mood the rest of the day. The morning nap is pretty important as if they've not had a good nights sleep it gives them a chance to catch up.

If you continue to nap by any means necessary and spend a few days making sure she gets enough day sleep, you can sort out bedtime.

My DS was a bad bad sleeper (still wakes at night though at 8 months) and we sorted out his bedtime routine which meant he went to sleep a lot easier. Our bedtime routine finishes with me feeding him in the dark then putting in the cot awake/drowsy depending on his mood. His bedtime is 6.45pm so the routine is:

• bath at 5.45pm
• story at 6pm
• lullabies at 6.15pm
• begin feeding at 6.30pm
• in cot and asleep by 6.45pm

I noticed that putting him to bed earlier stopped him waking at 5am! I hope that helps.

My routine is nearly the same as yours - bath at 6, start feeding at 6.30. But she doesn't really do drowsy - just awake or (less often) asleep...

We do take her out out for a snooze soon after waking - it used to be two hours and now can be two and a half/three...

It was another 5am start this morning. And she'd cried on two occasions by the time DP came to bed at 10.30!!

Oh dear! Can you put some dark towels over the window to help with the light?

This sounds crazy but could you put her to bed even earlier (say half an hour)? Also what time is her last nap of the day - maybe she needs another quick nap around 3.30pm/4pm? My DS still has three naps although is looking to drop the third one. But I know he still needs it otherwise he has a meltdown come 5pm (or gets more and more hyperactive then meltdown at 6pm).

Do you mean awake for 3 hours before her morning nap? That seems too long to me (sorry!).There's the risk that she's so overtired that she gets a second wind?

If you do want to get tough, you could try pick up put down (we did it though and it made DS really really upset so we stopped after three nights. However, after that he started to settle much better)?

Hmm, yes. Three hours may be too long. Trouble is, she has to be taken for a walk, and if she gets up at 5, it takes us that long to be ready to leave the house... Not ideal, but there we are.

I tried PUPD before and found it to be a total disaster. She became SO worked up and upset (and it did my back in!).

We are away at the moment. When we get back I'll try to do something about the light...

The whole thing is really getting me down. The other night I shouted at her . Luckily she laughed in my face, but I don't really want to be doing that...

flower I completely understand the shouting I used to lose my temper and have to put DS in the cot and leave the room. At one point I thought I was going mad and DH took time off work to help me out as the lack of sleep absolutely killed me.

DS went through a phase of the early 5am start (I usedto feel sick to my stomach!). It was a killer. I used to get him to nap again at half 7ish by rocking in a dark room with loud white noise. (Do you have an iPhone? You can download it for free via an app). It meant that on those days he had four naps a day of 45 mins each but it started to help get him less overtired and slowly made things easier.

Sadly no iPhone. I play her classical music but it doesn't seem to make much difference...I too am going totally insane with the sleep deprivation. I started examining another woman's yoghurts at the checkout today like a lunatic...

Will make more of an effort to make her sleep in the day. She has gone down now; it only took an hour....

Sadly no iPhone. I play her classical music but it doesn't seem to make much difference...I too am going totally insane with the sleep deprivation. I started examining another woman's yoghurts at the checkout today like a lunatic...

Will make more of an effort to make her sleep in the day. She has gone down now; it only took an hour....

Flowerface; we had a similar thing with ds. I paid 80 pounds for a consultation with these people. Best money I have ever spent and we cracked his sleep in a week. That was 18 months ago and he has slept 7pm to 7am ever since.

£80 sounds a bargain! What tips did they give?

flower lol at yoghurt madness. Can you go to bed now? Also you're probably so tired from going out in the pram for naps too. Does your DD sleep on you more easily in the day? Maybe it's worth doing that for a short term solution (forcing you to sit down and rest too)

fingers crossed for tonight.

big hugs flowerface.so hard. i really worked on the day routines to help me. read up and looked for the best method for my personality. i stuck with it for a week and did nothing that week but 'training' . IMO the nighttime nightmares! is DEFO to do with the day sleeps. crack that and you are onto a winner.

early starts... can't help with though, as can't seem to crack that myself

x

Thanks everyone. She is asleep now - I am drinking a glass of wine and watching Dr Who!

I am a bit suspicious of these 'miracle cure' things. Of course I would pay £80 if something worked... But I worry that it is just exploiting the desperate (and knackered!)

I find the whole thing extra hard because it makes me feel like a rubbish out-of-control parent.

She will very rarely sleep on me during the day, unfortunately... She has got so used to the pushchair, but the minute you stop she wakes up... It is very tiring....

tinks what sleep training did you do?

The 80 pounds thing is for two or three hour long phone calls which work out a sleep training plan that fits your baby and your preferences (e.g. if you don't want to let the baby cry then they devise something around that). It's by no means a miracle cure because you have to implement the plan which can be tough and requires real commitment but it really did work. Although I suspect that part of the reason why was that we finally had a plan that we both agreed to stick to and we were really consistent with (before we had been second guessing ourselves). Best 80 pounds I have ever spent.

Hi Flowerface. First posting, but I am a bit evangelical about sleep training. We had a nightmare sleeper and at 5.5 months decided that we would crack it. I'd been super scared of imposing sleep/feed routines etc. and had let her lead the way with everything which meant we were in the same kind of situation as you-tho' like you also had bedtime ritual of massage, bath, feed. She could only feed to sleep- two hours in silent dark room, it was so so dull. We'd often have 6-8 wake ups a night or she'd be awake 3-5am trying to feed to sleep and ending up puking as she'd drunk so much but couldn't sleep. Didn't make any of us happy. I was a miserable zombie living on cake! And I thought that maybe she just didn't need sleep. But I decided to try to tackle it and am so so pleased I did.
First I used a book called Save Our Sleep by Tizzie Hall which helped me to sort out self-settling. This was recommended to me at NCt so I sort of believed in it working already. And it meant that I could put her down awake and she'd go to sleep at least in the evening, but no dice at night. Then I found the Baby Moon (who are linked to Mars Lady who posts alot here and who helped me find my lovely doula when she wasn't available).
The sleep counsellor is Rebecca and she's a trained HV and sensible and straightforward. It's all done over the 'phone and it is really obvious but we found it so useful to talk to someone and be united about the resulting plan. She tailored it to us and we said e.g. we could bear five minutes of protest crying but didn't think we could leave her if any desperate screaming. And she gave us tactics for all eventualities. We had one night with total of two hours crying, then next of 45 minutes and next about 5 murmured minutes of complaint. She now sleeps 6-6 most nights and even got through teething.
I don't think sleep counselling is revolutionary but it really helped us to have confidence in keeping our DD happy and getting her to sleep. FWIW she still only naps twice in day, prob total of 2-2.5 hours but I am just so happy to have our nights back. Enjoy your wine and hope that you have a good night!

hi flowerface

i had a LO who got so used to motion ( either constant swaying or walking and walking in pushchair outside ( soooooo exhausting) that when people said ' lie down with them and see if they will go off with you next to them' i would try and throw something at them, as IT WOULD NEVER WORK!!

i bought the alison scott wright book( saw it and never heard of it, but thought it may help me),and baby whisperer- as was really at my wits end with rocking or having to go out in car/buggy to get her to sleep. haven't really read any other bits of the ASW book, just the sleep training bit and it certainly did the trick.dd was terrible at sleeping in the day and i was worn out with rocking and taking her out. you are knackered enough!!

basically coming up to 2 hours (IMO - THIS IS THE KEY) i take my dd to her room, change her, put in sleeping bag, give her a cuddle, put her in the cot, stroke her head and pat her tummy. all the time 'shushing her' and saying' sleepy time'. she responded so quick couldn't believe it! Now you are going to think this is bollocks and would never work - but its all about cues for the baby and i tried it one week and she wasn't going for it. Left it for a week and then tried again and cracked it that time.

obviously at the beginning of starting this, they don't settle straight away so after a few minutes i would go in and do some shush's and sleepy time, stroke her head and firmly but kindly say 'sleepy time' when she looked at me with bottom lip quivering! i kept repeating until she got the message. i think the key is to get them when they are not over tired, cause this would never work, as they are too' animated' and get too worked up. also to not linger when putting down and to assess with a bit of crying dying down, or building up, when to go in.

she had found her fingers at a similar time, so maybe i got lucky with self soothing. some days its better than others but she now knows the routine and craves it almost ( ok now she won't settle when we are out! - but its a better problem than before!!)

try it and good to do some reading ( have you? ) as they have great tips

But should I just stop feeding her at night? And what do I do instead? Pick her up? Not pick her up??

I did have a couple of books incl. the Baby Whisperer which I threw away in a rage. Maybe I am being oversensitive, but they always seem to make it feel as though it's all my fault, and I already feel like that anyway...

Last night she was up five times. I was so tired I hallucinated something about a spider, and went gibbering to DP about how he had to go and kill this massive spider (which did not exist) without turning the lights on...

Flowerface; caramelgirl's advice is good. The main thing you need is a plan on how to tackle this. Whether you get that by consulting books, using a sleep agency or just seeking advice here, I'd suggest that you decide during the cold light of day how you are going to tackle wake ups during the night and then stick consistently to that for 5 nights and see what happens.

Re your specific questions, unless you decided on PUPD, I wouldn't pick her up once she has gone to bed. You can reassure her, leaning over the cot and stroking, sshing etc but not pick her up. Just my view though and you need to decide how tough you want to and can be.

The question is: is it unreasonable to expect a 6 month old to get through the night with no feeds? Would it be meaningless to say something like 'I won't feed her after midnight' - will that just confuse her?

I think some babies can sleep through at this age and some do need a feed. But the key thing is that I think it would be highly unusual for a baby to need more than (at the most) two night time feeds at this age. On the whole babies that feed more than this during the night do so because they are very good at self settling so every time they move into a lighter part of the sleep cycle, instead of putting themselves back to sleep, they wake up and need to be fed back to sleep. So I reckon the key is to try and teach her to self settle and the rest will follow. I'd aim for one feed a night personally but you know your baby best. Does this help at all?

because they aren't very good at self settling. (Not are* which wouldn't make any sense at all.)

Yes. Thanks. I think you're right that that's part of the problem and the other part is that she doesn't feed that well during the day (though solids are OK) because she gets too easily distracted and knows she can refuel at night...

I know you're right. A couple of months ago she only used to wake once or twice (of course I complained about that - didn't know how lucky I was!!)

I am just worried about giving her a consistent lesson in terms of whether she will or won't get fed at night...

So then you need to cut back on her night feeds so that she has no option but to take what she needs in the day (and try and feed her somewhere with minimal distractions during the day so she can concentrate on that alone). The key thing is to figure out when she is waking for hunger and when it is because she just wants to be resettled. If you only feed her when you are sure she is hungry the rest will fall into place. With both my children, I knew when this was because they had a dummy for a while and if they would resettle with the dummy I knew they weren't hungry. By 4am, the dummy was no longer enough so when I decided to sort their sleep out, I got rid of the dummy and vowed not to feed them before 4am as I knew they could go until then.