5 month old spurradic night waking never happened before

[Posie]

My 20 week old has suddenly begun waking in the night the past 4 nights in a row.  He doesn't seem upset and lies there for hours chatting to himself.  He was on a 4 hour easy routine which has been messed up by some unavoidable travel in the past month.  I'm struggling to get him to sleep during the day yesterday he woke in the morning after 45 mins but then after persistence I managed to get him to go back to sleep for a further hour and 10 mins and it was the same story in the afternoon.  I put him down for the night at 6pm and within a half hour he was awake and we battled to get him to go back to sleep until 8pm.  By 2.30 he was awake and chattering to himself. He's always been an excellent sleeper and I'm exhausted and at the end of my tether.  Do you think it could be hunger?  We eliminated the dream feed about 3 weeks ago and things were going fine.  I have been breastfeeding but I'm afraid my milk level is going down.  We just started him on baby rice with his 11am feed and he seems to like it.

His feeds are 7am, 11am, 3pm and between 6 and 6.30pm.

Thanks
Pamela

[Colin Macs Mom]

Hi Pamela,

My advice to you is to consider stopping the rice until he's 6 mo. It's quite hard for LOs to learn to digest it, and starting solids often produces tummy upset and gas until they adjust. Starting early, even a month early can make things even worse. Sleep disturbance is often part of the process.

If you must continue with it, it would be better to do it at the 7am feed so that LO has the entire day to work on getting it out of his system before sleep.