baby sleep routine

rjh090384

hi

i ahve a 9 week old baby. the past week she was doing great and sleeping all night. she has now stopped doing this and has started to wake for her bottle during the night around 2oclock and awake again at 5.00 when hte only way to get her back to sleep is to bring her to bed with me which i know is abig bad thing to do!!! her problem is she wont sleep during the day and is very overtired by the time the evening comes. if she falls asleep during the day and you put her down she wakes straight back up again. i am tryingt o establish a routine but its hard as her last feed time depends on what time she had her first feed at in the morning. she normally takes 5 6oz bottles of the hungrier milk a day. also when she is overtired, even when she is due a feed she wont take itand gets very fed up and grumpy.
any advice please? also feel free to move this if it is in the wrong place.

thanks
xo

mirrorimage0

have you tried giving her water through the night, she probably wont like it and make a fuss but after a few nights she will get the idea she isnt getting any food during the night, ours used to have thier last feed around 11 ish and be up at half fivish, you have to be realistic on how long your baby can go without bottle though, are you cuddling her to sleep during the day, have you tried feeding her and then putting her down still awake so she settles herself into sleep. also we used to bath ours before bedtime as it generally tires them out that bit more for a restful sleep.

hope this helps im sure you will get lots more advice though. x

amandada

We used the "bath bottle bed" routine with ours from a few weeks old-your baby's probably at a really good age to get started with this.

I'd definitely try to get her down awake-we didn't do it with dd, but made sure we did with ds! If she's unsettled, don't lift her, just stroke her cheek or something similar so she doesn't feel totally abandoned, then leave her again. If she doesn't settle, then leave her for a minute or 2 (fingers in ears help at this point!) before you go back to her again, and so on. I worked on the theory of knowing that ds was fed, winded, cosy and had a clean nappy on, so there can't have been anything wrong! (with the proviso of course that you know your own baby so if you think the cry is "different" then of course you have to act on it)
We managed to get ds pretty much sleeping through from about 10 weeksish by doing this.

My dd was a nightmare for not sleeping during the day. Because we had the bath bottle bed routine established, she associated this with going to bed, so for a while, I ended up bathing her in the morning too, and then putting her to bed, and I did usually manage to get a couple of hours sleep out of her! She was a wee bit older than 9 weeks though by the time I was doing this.
It made life a bit restrictive, but to be honest I was prepared to live with it if it meant I had a properly rested baby rather than a screaming skull!

Good luck

rjh090384

thanks yes she does fall asleep in my arms then i try to put her down adn you get ten minutes out of her if u lucky then she straight back up again but if i put her down awake she screams.

when she was in with us youcould put her down awake and she would fall asleep but not now she in her own room

Mojisola

rjh090384 wrote: »

i ahve a 9 week old baby. the past week she was doing great and sleeping all night. she has now stopped doing this and has started to wake for her bottle during the night around 2oclock and awake again at 5.00 when hte only way to get her back to sleep is to bring her to bed with me which i know is abig bad thing to do!!!

It isn't a bad thing - it's just unfashionable at the moment. What could be more natural for a baby than to cuddle up next to Mum (or Dad) with all the comfort and reassurance that close contact brings?

rjh090384

i just heard once u get them into the habit you will end up having them in bed with u for years!

liney

rjh090384 wrote: »

i just heard once u get them into the habit you will end up having them in bed with u for years!

Yes quite possibly, so it is a 'bad thing' if you aren't prepared to do that, however a 9 week old will be easy to get out of the habit if it is something you don't want to continue to do within a few days.

I recommend The Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg (RIP). It is quite a structured routine for small babies, but is kinder than many without any recommendations to leave your baby to cry - there's pick up/put down methods, Wake to sleep, Shushing, leaving the room in stages.. allsorts without leaving the baby to cry, which i refused to do.

Within a couple of weeks my DS was sleeping from 7pm to 7am with a 'Dream feed' at 11pm ish. Now he's 4 he still sleeps a good 12 hours. Magic.

I noticed someone said to give the baby water as a night feed. I would suggest that is more appropriate for an older baby who should be sleeping through. At 9 weeks a baby will still need nourishment at night time, and cannot really be expected to sleep more than 6 to 8 hours without a top up, hence Dream Feeding works - you give the baby a bottle without waking him before you go to bed yourself - if you wiggle the teat around their mouth they will suck.

Swaddling sometimes works for small babies who wake themselves up when you put them down. It's partly due to them still having jerky involentary actions, so the blanket helps calm that, and they fell like they are being held if done correctly.

Good luck.

sooty&sweep

Hi

All children are different so all I can tell you is what worked for me with my two.
but I would also say that you are incredibly lucky if you've got your daughter sleeping through at nine weeks !

Will she go to sleep if you take her for a walk in her pram or in her carseat in the car ? For a number of years we always went out just after lunch to ensure child did get a sleep.

That was the only way I could reliably get my two to sleep during the day.

Are you giving her any milk when she wakes up during the night ?
We gave my daughter a feed at about 11pm whether she woke for it or not to help her and me sleep through the night. She would take the milk even if she was asleep. Otherwise she woke at 2ish for a feed.

My son used to always fall asleep drinking a bottle of milk and would stop drinking the milk and so we would feed first and when he fell asleep we would then change his nappy which roused him enough to get him to take some more milk. Full tummy = more sleep !!

My son hated being put down if he fell asleep in your arms. One trick my midwife advised was to put a hotwater bottle into their cot / moses basket before you put the child in to warm the sheets up and then when you the child down take the hot water out of the cot. Apparently they like snugness of cuddling someone so a cold bed is a bit of a shock so warming the bed removes some of that shock. You MUST NOT leave the hot water bottle in bed with them.

Good Luck

Jen

Hell_Dans_Un_Handcart

It's quite normal for babies this age to wake during the night. In fact it's safer on the whole. Babies who fall into very deep sleeps are more at risk of SIDS - that's why hunger tends to wake them up, they are designed that way So please don't worry about it. It could well be a growth spurt - babies make developmental leaps all the time at this stage and they need the extra calories to burn off.

My daughter slept in with us from the beginning, but at one year now sleeps in her cot with no trouble. She didn't want to until around eight months, so I didn't push her. Now we have no sleep issues at all. The people who told me I was making bad habits are all rather quiet about it now! Just make sure you're doing it safely. Invest in a bedguard, keep your pillow away from baby, and use a cellular blanket or sheet instead of a duvet. Always dress baby lightly and don't have them in bed with you if either you or your partner are drinking, smoking or taking drugs. Keep baby on your side - away from your partner - until they are much bigger and are mobile.

It is, as others have mentioned, a commitment of sorts - you need to be prepared to have them in for a while. If the alternative is leaving them to cry then I'd go with cosleeping every time. Babies left to cry fall asleep on their own because their survival instincts kick in; they think they've been abandoned, so they go quiet so predators won't hear them. It's not reccomended that you leave a baby younger than six months to cry at all, and even then, I'd doubt that kind of stress does them much good.

There's a great book called The No Cry Sleep Solution - look it up on Amazon. It helps you to recognise when your baby is tired, so that you can notice and act on it, hopefully with better results. When my daughter was younger I found she preferred to sleep at an angle in her bouncy chair, rather than laying flat; this, as with all naps at that age, requires supervision to be safe.

Good luck.

Lunar_Eclipse

rjh090384 wrote: »

hi

i ahve a 9 week old baby. the past week she was doing great and sleeping all night. she has now stopped doing this and has started to wake for her bottle during the night around 2oclock and awake again at 5.00 when hte only way to get her back to sleep is to bring her to bed with me which i know is abig bad thing to do!!! her problem is she wont sleep during the day and is very overtired by the time the evening comes. if she falls asleep during the day and you put her down she wakes straight back up again. i am tryingt o establish a routine but its hard as her last feed time depends on what time she had her first feed at in the morning. she normally takes 5 6oz bottles of the hungrier milk a day. also when she is overtired, even when she is due a feed she wont take itand gets very fed up and grumpy.
any advice please? also feel free to move this if it is in the wrong place.

thanks
xo

I would try larger bottles. Is 6 oz the 'recommended' amount for a baby of this age? I thought they might take more at this age (ie 8/9 ozs)

Mine woke frequently (ie 2 hourly) for feeds at night from 10 weeks. They were big babies with appetites to match. Youngest was thus on 3 meals/day from 12 weeks - which I know is against the 6 month weaning advice now. How anyone with a hungry baby could cope with that I have no idea. Thankfully I had an understanding midwife who encourage the solids since living with a 17 month old toddler, a starving baby who needed food and a sleep deprived mother was a recipe for immediate delayed PND!

No harm in taking the baby to bed with you either. I know loads of people who did it (me included) and not one of them has created a longer term issue! I think that's so unusual but used to scare people off. You do whatever works for you to maximise household sleep!!

rjh090384

thanks for all the advice. it says on the back of my tin that she should be having 5oz and 6 oz is from 3 months. she doenst seem to want more than 6 though occassionally in the evening she will have an extra 2 oz. tonight we did bath, bottle, story then bed and pout her down awake!! i coudlnt believe it! she was well asleep within seconds and still asleep .will let u know in the morning if she sleeps all night or not. i have tried taking her for walks in her pram but hse doenst really sleep too well in it. she doesnt like lying flat in her pram. she is a nosey parker and likes to ssee everything about her.

can someone explain to me how the dream feed works? i would worry about her waking and not wanting to go back to sleep?