20 weeks...normal night waking???

[beckycook1]

Hello

My little girl is 20 weeks old and I'm wondering what she should be doing at night. She has a feed at 6.30 and is usually asleep by 7. She then wakes up between 11-12pm and then at roughly 4am and then around 7. However, despite the fact that she has the same bedtime routine every day and feeds every 3-3.5 hours during the day, each night is different. I am confused about a few things. I don't really get why each night is different and struggle to know if she is truly hungry or just waking up. I generally think she is hungry as she can self settle at night. Sometimes I hear her wake up, fuss a bit and then go back to sleep whereas other times she wakes up and then the crying escalates. When I pick her up she wriggles around opening her mouth and launching her open mouth at me whereas sometimes I have picked her up and it is clear she just wants a cuddle as she snuggles in. However, she starts the feed seeming ravenous and really guzzles (she is BF) but then becomes sleepy again and falls asleep feeding. She usually wakes when I try to burp her and place her back in the cot and then settles back down to sleep.

Other babies her age seem to go much longer at night. Is feeding every 4-5 hours normal for her age? I don't feel confident trying to withhold food and doing shush pat (which does work well sometimes...again making me think it must be genuine hunger) if she is hungry. If it has been a slightly shorter time than usual I try to get her back to sleep with shush pat but it doesn't work.
Also, what are the advantages of a dream feed? I have tried picking her up and feeding her before she wakes up herself at around 10-10.30 but she won't really feed if she isn't hungry and barely takes anything and then wakes up around 1-2am.

Sorry for the long post. Any advice would be appreciated1

[weaver]

Sounds very normal to me! Totally what my two did. I did a dream feed (around 10.30) and would have expected/not been surprised by a wake up around 4/5. You've got a good pattern going there, I think. You could consider doing a dream feed (DF) around 10ish, or whatever works for your bedtime, that would take the randomness out of that first WU and you should find, hopefully, that the 4am one will go soon enough. At least until she hits a growth spurt!

[lily_layne]

It also sounds normal to me. My first did exactly that. I never did do a DF because I like to go to bed early so I found that it was easier to just wake up and do the extra NF. I chose to interpret the erratic timings as evidence that they were hunger wakings and not habitual ones If you pick her up and she's giving hungry signals then I would just continue to feed her.