If baby falls asleep too late, do you still wake them up to be on schedule or no

[Clutz]

Hi,
For one week, we've been doing EASY with my 5.5 month daughter and now after one week, something's gone wrong....she started to get this routine, but now I noticed she's overtired, especially for her afternoons....and the last two nights after bath, she took 1 hour to settle down....I have been trying to follow the book to a T, but now I am wondering if she's not getting enough sleep at all?!


The routine below is what we follow, but due to the last 2 nights, I've not fed her right away when I woke her up and wondering if this is causing a problem.
E 7 wake up / bf
A 7:30
S 9 nap
E 11 wake up / solids and sometimes top up bf
A 11:30
S 1pm
E 3pm solids
A 3:30
S 5 nap (sometimes)
E 6 bf
A 6:20 - 6:45
7 bath
7:30 bed
around 11pm wake up again bf for about 40 min
around 3am wake up again bf for about 40 min
(last 2 nights, she's not gone down until about 5:30 am and then I'm trying to wake her up again at 7am to be on track)

so, as I mentioned, this was what we were doing...but I think I messed up somewhere this week.....being tired and still feeding at night a lot...I'm trying to get on a better track here....also, I live in a condo building and when I resolved to do EASY with PU/PD, our neighbours came knocking on our door the second night to complain about our noisy baby...I almost cried...it was taking 2 hours + the first night before she would finally sleep!

Help!

[zoeselina]

I have a baby the same age who is on an almost identical EASY to yours, which we've been working hard the last week or so to nail down. One of the things I really had to concentrate on was what we were spending our A time doing. I don't know what your baby is like with stimulation,  but for us we needed to tone it WAY down. She just got way too overstimulated and it was causing her to be up all night and not nap well.

I also wonder a bit whether she is getting enough calories through the day... with two solids meals pretty much replacing breastmilk, maybe she's not getting enough energy through the day and is trying to make it up by feeding at night?

I'm sure there are others who have more experience and knowledge about this than me, and I hope someone reads your post and can offer some more suggestions. Good luck and hang in there! {{{{hug}}}

[vanessamic]

so do you wake a baby to keep them on schedule? If yes what if they need the sleep or didn't sleep well the day before?
If no how does a baby ever only sleep the same amount of time each nap period?
help!

[Jiinx]

Hi there,
 Just chiming in with zoeselina..but wasn't sure if there was a missing bf? You mentioned she got a top off at 11pm? Why a top off and not a feed?
Until 1 year, breast milk is really all they need and solids is just for fun and taste. Did her doctor suggest otherwise?

I'm not sure she's OT..but perhaps getting too little A time for her age? At her age, typical A times is around 2.25 - 2.5 hours. Her first A can be shorter, but typically only by 15 minutes. Have you tried increasing her second A by a bit?

In terms of waking them up, I usually let mine sleep in for 30 minutes if she wants. However, she's a bit older can handle being OT. I think if she has a rough night, a half hour shouldn't hurt. Or you can wake her up, give her a nap a tad bit earlier and go from there.

HTH..

[Clutz]

Hi,
I've had the hardest week of my life I think....I dare to say we are right off track...but now I feel that my daughter is heavier.....it must have been a growth spurt....I started feeding her solids because I'm following the Nourishing Traditions (Sally Fallon) protocol....I partially did it with my middle son.  I think the biggest problems that we are facing have to do with unsettling and noise....Do you not find that most baby books 'talk' as if a routine is geared towards your first baby...hardly do I see what to do when you have 2 noisy older brothers who forever don't know how to whisper around the house or slam the toilet seat down or drag things on the floor...I'm talking about this and yet, living in a high rise that poses its own problems....barking dogs, fire engines...what have you....I'm exasperated...once she gets disturbed it takes us an average of 2-3 hours to get her back to sleep...nightly.  My husband and I are all over the place now....usually our  3 1/2 yr old still requests my husband to stay with him during his bedtime and between the little ones, it's hard...when I'm exhausted and exasperated, he takes over....unless of course it's b/f time.  Honestly, at this point if I wasn't going back to work, I'd scrap all this and just let her cuddle in my arms as much as she wants or even go back to having her co-sleep with me...it's not like I'm getting more sleep now that she's off our bed and I'm not feeding her in bed...in fact, I didn't think back then that I could possibly get less sleep, but it's what it is...I'm so frustrated.

[zoeselina]

You poor thing. {hugs} Sounds like you're having a really rough time.

Have you tried white noise of some kind in your baby's room? Our baby's room has windows at ground level (the bottom floor of our apartment is a built out cellar) and there are always cars starting and people walking by outside. So even with the windows shut there is a bit of noise. We also have cats that like to run up and down the stairs and make noise in the hall.

So we got one of those Cloud B sleep sheep things that makes white noise that you can play quite loud and it tends to dampen and distract from other noises: http://cloudb.com/ssandf/sheep.html

Of course you don't need to use a device like this. Just a pedestal fan or a radio set to static could do the trick.

Hoping things get better for you soon.

[Clutz]

thanks...I appreciate it...it's like that again tonight...the only difference is today, we had to go out a bit as a family, so she ended up sleeping later 8:30pm instead of around 7pm-ish....took her 15 min to settle down in my arms (that is with heavy crying)...then I got her down, and one hour later she was up again....I hardly leave this house...I do barely anything outside, only what's absolutely necessary...tonight we took a chance as we wanted to treat our older boys out for dinner and we haven't had a family 'thing' in so long the boys were excited....I feel like it was such a risk...after spending about 30 min to try to calm her down after the second wake up, my husband is in there right now as I type this....taking his turn to settle her down....it's now going to be the typical 'forever' to calm her down.....I just don't get it anymore!  We do have a white noise machine, we've used it since she was about 3 months old...a good friend at church let us borrow hers and it's a really good one, but, I don't know....I guess I was hoping for some kind of miracle or something to happen.  I have to know....does this EASY and PU/PD really work overall or is it just a dragged out way to get them to sleep 'eventually' when they're much older?
thx,
LM

[Clutz]

ok...baby Hannah is now 6.5 month old....what did I learn?  I learned that when I started doing E.A.S.Y and PU/PD shortly after she was going through a growth spurt, then she and her older brother got a cold and then of course teething!  All this was going against what I was trying to do...somehow we survived it....she is now definitely a routine girl..if anything goes off schedule, she is restless and cannot sleep well at night....so it's been a battle trying to learn all this and manage the older boys, but things are looking much better....oddly enough, her teeth are still not quite popping out...(the first two bottom ones)....I found she developed a screechy kind of cry over a month ago that was making things really hard to manage, but now I see that it must be a cry from pain and discomfort and so I can handle it better and know what to do to make her feel more comfortable...I do desperately wanted to scoop her in my arms and comfort her all night, but I knew it would be hard to break that habit again....my good friend is a few weeks away from going back to work and her one year old is up at all hours, hard to feed and he always ends up in bed with her...it's her first child...and I went through that with my first and partially with my second and only for the first 3-4 months with my little one now...so that's why it helped me to know that despite these hard times it does get better, but I admit going through them....argh!  So hard to see straight sometimes when you're utterly exhausted!