Night wakings changed for my 5 month old.

[July14]

My baby girl is 5 months old. Although she never slept through she was always a good sleeper at night. She would wake up one for a feed and then be back to sleep within 30 mins. Unfortunately this changed a couple of weeks ago.

She has now started to wake at 2am (regardless of what time she goes to bed) and then it takes me an hour after her feed to get her to sleep again (if Im lucky). After that she will wake about every hour until its 7am at which point I start the day. Im exhausted and just dont know what to do. Her length of naps have increased during the day just as her sleep at night decreased.

She is formula fed and has porridge in the morning and a tablespoon of vegetable puree late afternoon  (the puree has only been introduced in the last week.)

Our day looks more or less like this:

Wake at 7am.
Bottle at 8 ish
Awake time until about 9
Nap from 9 (can vary anything between 30 minutes to 2.5 hours)
10-11 am Nappy change and porrdige after nap.
Awake time for 2 hours after first woken.
Bottle around 12 ish and then a nap (can vary anything between 30 minutes to 2.5 hours )
After nap awake time is 2 hours again
Nap around 2-3pm
Veg puree between 4-5pm
Bed time routine starts anything from 5.30 to 6.30 (depending on time of last nap).
Bottle and bed by 7pm.

She cut 2 teeth 3 weeks ago without any symptoms.

She is currently on 4 bottles a day. During the day nappies are changed before her nap unless otherwise necessary.

I thought the more she sleeps during the day the better she will sleep at night, although it seems to be the opposite. Her awake time can only be for 2 hours. Anything over this and she gets overtired and i really struggle to get her to sleep.

She doesn't take a dummy and i dont rock her to sleep. Shes a tummy sleeper so i put her down and shush and sing whilst patting her bum/back until she drifts off. Sometimes she drifts off by herself and other times she cant unless i shush-pat.

She sleeps with a terry towel underneath her head as a comfort and will suck on it as she falls asleep.

What can I change to increase her night sleeps as it seems she is in a habit of waking at 2 when I am sure she is more than capable of sleeping through without a night feed.

[Kellyjs]

If it is the opposite hun, in that the nights are worse after those great naps, then I'm thinking she's getting too much day sleep and that's robbing her night sleep.

2x 2.5hr naps is a lot of day sleep, I think it would be unrealistic to expect 12hrs NS after that. Perhaps you could look at capping the naps to 2hrs each? That really might throw your day off though. Do you think she'd be able to look at an increase in A time very, very slowly? So adding 5mins every 3 days or so?

[July14]

I suspect she may sleep too much in the day too. Yesterday and today ive woke her up after 2 hours napping and she did an 8 hour stretch last night. Ive also tried extending her awake time to about 2.5 hours. Thanks for your reply

[Kellyjs]

Anytime sweetie, pop back if you need to x