I'm hoping someone can offer help, DH and I are losing hope...
DD is 3 months/13 wks. I started pt/sh training with at 5 weeks. By 9-10 weeks, all seemed to be going well. Daytime sleep is still OK. She goes down for naps with a 5 min winddown and usually no patting or fussing. I have been able to extend some naps by going in a gently patting at the 20-min mark, and we are still working on that.
It's the nighttime sleep that's the real problem. Pat/shh never really "took hold" for nighttime--it was a nightmare trying to do it for bedtime, she would scream and scream until I took Tracy's advice and offered food after 45 minutes--she would usually only calm down at that point and fall asleep at the breast. It never seemed to be that big of a deal, though, since she never had days mixed for nights, never really wanted to be "awake" in the nighttime. She woke for feeds and that's it, so I assumed she would drop feeds as time went on and that would be that. Up to about 10 weeks we had a fairly stable nighttime pattern of 2 feeds around 2 and 5 a.m., and she would go back to sleep immediately (usually asleep or nearly asleep when I put her down after feedings).
At 9.5 weeks she actually slept a 9-hour stretch and a couple of 7-hour stretches. We were ecstatic! Then, I took her on a weekend trip at 10 weeks and it kind of unraveled. She did OK on the trip, I was able to stick pretty closely to her routine. On the trip we had one really bad bedtime during which she was awake for her longest strech to date--6 hours. I chalked that up to overstimulation and overtiredness.
Fast forward to now. She is waking 4-5 times at night and becomes hysterical if she is not nursed or fed, is difficult to settle if not fed, then will either not go to sleep easily after being fed, or will wake 30 mins to 1 hour later. All totaled, she is spending about 4 hours of every night awake, much of it crying.
Several things have changed recently. I moved her bedtime up from about 8:30 - 9 p.m. to 7 (she was takinig two evening catnaps to get her through to 9 p.m., now that her waketime between naps has increased her bedtime naturally moved up when we dropped the second catnap). Since she slept those long stretches at 9 weeks and was often feeding for just a couple of minutes during night wakings, I felt we could start trying to drop one nighttime feed. I went back to work March 1, so DH has been trading off nighttime duty with me so I can get some sleep. I also introduced a dreamfeed at 10 because of the earlier bedtime, but it seems to make things worse so we are phasing that out now (feeding smaller amounts earlier and earlier--just started that plan last night).
Swaddling is just not working out anymore. She gets out of everything. Often when she wakes she has at least one arm out, but I don't know for sure if that's what's causing the waking. I started using the Miracle Blanket last week, but it doesn't work for us. If anything it's worse--she still gets out, but has a ton more fabric bunched around her making her hot and uncomfortable. If she can get out of the MB I don't know what else to do, but I can't see her sleeping unswaddled. I don't know if we should invest in yet another swaddle product or just cut our losses and try and wean the swaddle--a scary thought!!!
She doesn't respond well to pat/sh in the nighttime now--she arches her back and screams. She will sometimes settle if given a paci, but not always and I feel we are dangerously close to having a paci addiction on top of everything else. She does not use a paci for daytime sleeps.
So we are dealing with several issues--a possible suck-to-sleep association, since she has been fed at bedtime and at nearly every waking (or else given a paci) , swaddling, dropping dreamfeed, and trying to drop a night feeding. I am positive she is being overfed at night, causing conditioned hunger and habitual wakings. On DH's nights with her, I have had to get up to nurse her because he cannot get her to settle, so neither of us are getting much sleep. DH is also getting very discouraged, feels he is failing his daddy duties because he has to come and get me. I am so sleep deprived I don't know how to sort this all out and what issue to tackle first.
Her daytime routine has been very stable for the past two weeks: feed at 7, 10, 1, 3:30, 5:30 (short feed after waking from catnap) and 7 (bedtime); 80-90 minute A time including wind-down, 1.5 hour naps and 30 minute catnap. It doesn't matter if I swaddle before or after the bedtime feed or try and keep her awake, she almost always falls asleep during the bedtime feed. She also wants to nurse for a very long time at this feed--up to 40 or 50 minutes, whereas daytime feeds take 20 minutes.
She then wakes sometimes as early as 11 p.m., then every hour or two after that. I don't think she is reverse cycling--she takes plenty of food in the daytime.
It's so discouraging because we've worked so hard at sleep training and at stabilizing her daytimes, and are still having so many night problems at this point. If anyone has made it through this far and can offer any advice, it's welcome! We're desperate.
