Our LO is 11 weeks today, and she had been doing great over the last month since I started EASY at 7ish weeks. Prior to the issues we've been having, she would go down at about 9:15 (bedtime ritual started at
, and would wake once briefly to eat around 3ish, and would immediately go back down until 6:30am or so. She tended to be a very noisy sleeper since birth, particularly in that 3 - 6:30am zone, but it wasn't terrible and I could tune it out (she sleeps bedside).
We moved overseas two weeks ago, and I fully expected there to be a bit of a sleep regression. She had a couple of rough nights in the beginning, but we stuck to the schedule and before we knew it, she was sleeping through the night from 7pm to 5am, with no wakings! Since the new location is in one time zone over, we kept the bedtime the same, although it was now 7pm here (i.e. her body still thought it was 8pm). I did this because I noticed it was getting trickier and trickier to time that last catnap of the day with bedtime, and so this just sort of merged that last catnap with bedtime. So now, we start bedtime routine around 6:30pm and she's down at 7:15 (and she's super tired by then). She often pops up at 8:30pm, and I use this opportunity to top her up (I exclusively BF), and she goes right back down. Her naps are very consistent -- she takes a 45 minute nap, then a 2.5 - 3 hour nap, then a 1 hour nap, and finally a 50-ish minute nap (four naps a day). She's awake about 1 hour 15 minutes to 1.5 hours between each nap, and goes down very easily for each nap.
So here is the issue: in the last week, every single night, she goes down great but then is up around 1am AND WON'T GO BACK TO SLEEP. If I put her down after a feeding, she starts to kick and thrash and grunt like crazy. She looks very uncomfortable, arching her back and kicking madly. It's so strange, because she goes down for all of her naps and for bedtime beautifully, with almost no soothing necessary. We swaddle, put on the noise machine, give her a pacifier, dim the lights, set her down, and walk away...and she puts herself to sleep 95% of the time. But at 1am, it's a whole different story. She is just a little fiend, and the pat-shush has absolutely no effect. If I pick her up, she may arch her back a couple of times, but she eventually will quiet down and fall deep asleep in my arms. The second I put her down in her bassinet, it starts all over again. I've tried both keeping the environment super calm and quiet for the feeding, and also changing her diaper/clearing her nasal passages with a bulb syringe, just in case she's uncomfortable from one of those issues. Neither has any effect. I end up awake with her, rocking, patting, shushing, for about two hours from 1 - 3am every night, until she finally falls back asleep (and she will still grunt in her sleep from there on out, but she's calmer). Then, she's up for good at 5am or so. I am just wrecked with exhaustion.
My husband thinks we need to move her bedtime back to 9pm or so, and give her a 5th nap in the evening (i.e. unmerge bedtime and her last catnap). He also thinks we should move her into her own room and just let her grunt it out on her own, once I've fed her and changed her to make sure she's fine (this doesn't feel right to me at all). I'm hesitant to change anything when she was so recently sleeping AWESOME, wondering if I should just grit my teeth and get through whatever wonder week/growth spurt/adjustment to the new location might be causing this. Suggestions are very much welcome!!
