Hello, I'm looking for a bit more advice on my 3 month old baby girl. She is exclusively breastfed, but for the past 3 - 4 weeks she has been waking frequently in the night, every 2 hours at least, sometimes even after one. In the day her nap times went to pot too, she was only managing 30- 34 mins each time, but that seems to be improving at the moment. I have to hold my hands up and say that I have been guilty of breast feeding her to sleep, but for the last couple of nights that has stopped and we've adopted our own version of the shhh pat approach, with me rubbing her tummy and using a lullaby toy with a soothing. After a bumpy start, its been going pretty well considering.
However, I have a few questions you might be able to help me with:
1. At what point to I withdraw myself from ssh pat? How will my daughter learn to settle without me eventually. I am worried that I will eventually become a 'prop' myself. I read somewhere you have to stay with them until they are in deep sleep or they wake up and cry, this is true of my baby, she often jolts herself awake so I find myself by her crib for sometime. But when will that stop and at what point should she learn to put herself back to sleep from that?
2. When she wakes in the night after an hour or two and I know she is not hungry, should I leave her to cry or get in there quick to try and lull her back to sleep before she becomes too wake?
3. Is there anything, ANYTHING!, I can do to help decrease the number of night wakings, its killing me. I feel like a walking zombie. Also I worry that it isn't good for my baby as she is never really achieving long or deep periods of sleep.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me. This site is brilliant.