Hi, Im new here and would love some advice for my 14-week-old. From 8-10 weeks he put himself into a more or less 3-hour EASY routine all by himself, and I naively thought everything was going to be EASY! Then suddenly at about 10-11 weeks he started only managing 40 minute naps during the day and its thrown everything out.
He has a consistent wake up time between 6.30-7.30am and bedtime around 7pm. I put him down roughly every 1.5 hours as per the routine (I always watch for tired signs to make sure he is tired) but I cant get him to sleep longer than 40 mins, and sometimes he will only sleep 20-30 mins! I have tried shush pat and PU/PD to force him to sleep longer and have about a 40% success rate. But when I do get him back to sleep its usually only for 5-20 mins, never another full sleep cycle.
He is always eager to eat when he wakes up, but because I am also trying to keep to the 3-hour feeding routine, I dont always offer him food and rather try distract him to force him to wait for the next feeding time. But this is also problematic as he eats best after a nap, so sometimes he will eat half the bottle, then only finish the rest an hour later (perhaps I shouldnt be offering him the rest later, but then I worry it will affect his next nap and I'm always naively hopeful that he will sleep 1.5 hours!)
I was pretty relaxed about this routine as he seemed mostly happy and I was hoping he would eventually grow out of it, but in the last week or so he has also developed gas at 3-5am which means he is sleeping badly around that time. And in the last 3 days he has started waking more often at night as well. So Im worried he is now getting overtired and I really need to intervene on this bad routine!
Just for some extra info he weighs 7.5kgs (16.5 pounds) and is on a mainly formula diet with a bit of breastfeeding (I'm back at work part time so we have been cutting down more and more on the breast over the past month, but I've combination fed since he was 3 weeks due to low supply so he's used to the mix). I've worked out he's getting an average of about 14 hours of sleep in 24 hours.
