For just about a week now, my LO (who is 6.5 months old) has been waking every hour at night. I put her down to sleep around 7-7:30pm, and she'll literally wake up every hour until her night feeding at ~3am. After that one, she'll sleep until 6:30 or 7:30am (depending when I got her to bed - if bedtime was 6 or 6:30pm, she's up at 6:30am. If bedtime was 7 or 7:30pm, she's up at 7:30am) . Each time she wakes I give her an opportunity to resettle herself, but she just starts working herself up and I end up patting her back to sleep. I was actually starting to think she was becoming dependent on patting to settle, but then we had an exception to the new pattern last night - I got her to sleep at 7pm without having to shush or pat at all, and she woke once at 8pm and resettled herself without needing me to go in the room. She then woke for her DF at 11 and went back to sleep, but then woke at 2:15am happy and babbling, fed her at 2:45am, and then didn't go back to sleep until 4am (and proceeded to sleep until 8:15am). Not great, but certainly tolerable. I had such high hopes that whatever phase she was going through was over.... however, tonight she's back to waking every hour. I've tried waiting a bit at each waking, but she's working herself up into a screaming fit quite fast (actually had to use the nasal aspirator on her the last time before I gave her a paci, as she made herself all snuffly and couldn't breathe through her nose). She's only rarely going longer than an hour on her daytime naps lately, too (which is making her schedule a little wonky), though this morning she did a little over 2 hours for her first nap.
What is the culprit likely to be when a baby is waking every hour? She's fairly easy to resettle - usually just needs to be patted for 5 minutes, occasionally also with a pacifier (it's not a prop for her - she doesn't wake when she drops it, and doesn't need it every time). She'll seem to be fast asleep, but then suddenly wakes and gets upset. She DOES know how to resettle herself, so I'm not sure what's up with her lately.... before the every hour wakings started, she was frequently doing an hour or so after her NW feed at around 3am where she wanted to be up and active, which would then move her wake-up time to 8:30am or even 9am (I know, I should have woken her at 7:30am when that happened, but I'm running on so little sleep it was just too hard to give up that little bit of extra sleep! Especially on nights where she was up until 5am)
Here's her EASY, we've been doing this for about a month. I know her first A is quite short, but she gets very fussy and sleep cues like crazy (hair pulling, ear pulling, eye rubbing) if I try to go much longer than that.
Awake at 7:30am
E: 8am
A
S: 9am (1hr 20min -2hrs)
E: 11am
A
S: 1pm (1hr 20min -2hrs)
E: 3pm
A
S: 5pm (30min - 45min)
E/A: 6pm-7pm (I nurse her 2 or 3 times here to try and fill her up)
S: 7:30pm
DF: 11pm (though she often wakes at 10 or 10:30, and I feed her then)
NW: between 2:30 and 3:30am, feed
EW: 6:15am - she doesn't always do this, but when she does she just talks to herself a bit in the bassinet, then resettles herself in about 1/2 an hr. I only know she does it because her babbling wakes me up.
I'd love to get rid of her 3am feeding, but I'm much too exhausted to cope with that right now! My husband works away from home, and is only home 3 nights a week (Fri, Sat, Sun) so the rest of the week it's all me. LO is exclusively breast fed, though will take bottles of expressed milk (DH did her very first night of pu/pd and shush/part (she was using nursing as a prop before) and has taken her for a night here and there). I'd started her on solids (baby led), but she's been 100% breast milk again for the last 5 days, as I was thinking maybe her system just wasn't ready for solids and an upset tummy was to blame... but it's been long enough now that that's looking less likely.