5+ month old - when will he go BACK to sleeping through the night? can i help?

[becj86]

Definitely that first nap is shrinking at that A time of 2:20 to 2:25 - really need to increase that, though by maybe 15min initially.

Provided he's had a long nap, 3hr A to bed should be ok, I'd think, today.

You have a fairly high sleep needs little person there - not premature, perchance?

[tinydancer]

So update on today, he ended up sleeping for a total of 1hr50 with no resettling and has just had 3hr5 of A time and gone down to sleep without much fuss at all. He was pretty much asleep when I laid him down so maybe exhausted from the strange day.

No, not premature! Only early by 4 days and he's a fairly robust baby, didn't lose any birthweight when he came home etc. When you say high sleep needs, what are the indications of that?

I'll try 2hr45 A time tomorrow, do you think? Do you have any ideas for how I keep feeding him the 4hr schedule with this? Just keep feeding him when he wakes, I guess? Sorry if this is a silly question. I'm doing BLW so he's not really reliant on solids for sustenance at this stage. 

[becj86]

When you say high sleep needs, what are the indications of that?

Just that he sleeps so well on such short A times - not a bad thing, just interesting for me to see as mine was the opposite and had really high A times. He may just be an angel baby too, we shall see

You don't need to worry so much about the 4hrly feedings by this age if he is happy between feeds - you can try a BF topup after you offer solids an hour after the main feed when he wakes if you're worried he won't make it to the next feed, but 2:45+1:30 is 4:15, so it's not that much over the 4hr, so he may be totally fine.

[tinydancer]

Just that he sleeps so well on such short A times

Ah, right! Yeah, he never used to be. He went for a good couple of months only wanting to sleep for 45mins at a time and I wasn't able to resettle him into another sleep cycle. It's so nice to have longer stretches now! After you mentioned being in a UT/OT loop, I was wondering if he was doing these longer sleeps in the AM with no resettling as he was trying to catch up from the disturbed and often shorter nights.

It seems like we've had a bit of improvement since upping to 2:45 A. The first night he woke only the once, at 2am-ish and the same again last night. He still wakes for his df & also seems to be habitually waking at 6am. Maybe this will change once we get a bit more settled in to these new times!

Yesterday was a strange one as we were at my Mum's for her birthday. Lots of people to look at, older cousins to giggle at - he just didn't want to sleep!!

Thanks again, will keep you updated!

[tinydancer]

I think we are getting somewhere!

The last 4 days we've been working with the 3hr A time and down to 2 naps, and he's just waking once at night and sleeping through until 7am! The past few nights he woke between 2am-230am, so I was wondering if it was habitual but then last night he woke at 1am for a feed, and then slept from then until 7am! Longest stretch we've had in a while. He's got a little bit of an upset stomach at the moment, so I'll keep feeding him for now until that clears and then reassess from there.

I'm just wondering, what should I keep an eye on from here? Will his A times likely stay like this for a while or do they keep lengthening at a steady pace?

Thanks again for your help and advice!

[becj86]

Glad you're seeing some improvement

A times keep increasing at a fairly steady pace, really. At around 8 months or so, you will likely see one of your two long naps start to shrink to accommodate the longer A times and still maintain a day of approx. 13hr. This is the beginning of a 6-10 month long process of dropping to one nap. That sounds awful, but its not all bad, around 9-10 months I generally see a routine with one short nap and one long nap solidify and that sticks around for a while til ~12-13 months when the wonder weeks wreak their havoc on sleep (increasing/decreasing sleep needs depending on the child).

What's best to watch for is shrinkage of the nap, return of long happy wakings in the early hours of the morning or early wakings (short nights, not early by the clock). Refusal of one nap or BT is another sign a tweak is needed. If any of those happens 2 times in 3 days, its time to tweak before you run into a bigger problem