Hi, I'm after some advice from anyone who may have had a similar problem to me and managed to resolve it.
I have a 6 week old who is a mixture of spirited/grumpy and bottle fed.
We have a rough 3 hour EASY routine, which looks like this:
7am feed (4oz)
8.15-10am nap
10am feed (4oz)
11-11.40am nap
1pm feed (3.5oz)
1.45-4pm nap
4pm feed (4.5oz)
4.30-5.20pm nap
6pm feed (2oz)
6.30pm bath, quiet time in room
7.30pm top up feed in nursery with lights dim (3.5oz)
7.45pm put to bed in nursery
11.30pm dream feed in nursery with lights dim (5oz) then transferred to our room in a moses basket
3.30am feed (5oz)
Activity time can be anything from a nappy change to a kick about on the mat (depends on how long I can keep him awake.
Ever since we got him home we have tried to establish a routine. He definitely can't go more than 3 hours in the day for a feed. However over the last 3 days he's been wanting to eat more, which I think is due to a growth spurt (he was waking 2-3 times in the night for a feed rather than once at 3.30am).
Our main problem with him is that he just won't settle when we put him to be in his nursery at around 7pm. We follow the same routine every day, bath/bottle/bed, but whatever his naps are during the day, he won't sleep for longer than about 10-15 minutes at a time after being put to bed. Therefore we're constantly up and down the stairs to try and resettle him (we try not to go straight away but he ends up getting really wound up so we go and see to him) therefore I'm not getting any quality time with my husband. We don't turn on the lights, but shh/pat and find him his dummy.
The funny thing is that once he's been moved into our room after the DF, he seems to settle better and often doesn't want his dummy.
When he wakes up in the night for his feed, he feeds in the dark, no nappy change and no talking. So it's all quiet. He usually takes about 10-15 minutes to feed and then he is burped and put back in his moses basket. Sometimes he will go back to sleep straight away, other times he it will take him about 20-30 minutes to settle, but we generally leave him to try and settle himself.