Hello!
I have my first wonderful and happy LO who is just shy of 6 months.
We are trying so hard to establish a schedule but her sleep is so erratic it's not quite taking form.
She used to be a cat napper but has recently started taking longer naps some days. She is also waking up a lot at night. She is EBF. I'm finding out difficult to get her to eat when she wakes up bc she's so excited to see me (which is the best feeling EVER) she is distracted and won't fully feed. Even when we are still in her dark room and I don't interact too much. I have found she will nurse more at the end of activity time when she's tired and she doesn't usually fall asleep when I feed her then or I keep her awake of she starts dozing. I use a 4s routine for nap and bedtime. She loves it, she knows exactly what is coming next and is usually pretty easy to put down for a sleep. She loves a good bum pat. The only tricky part is that when she wakes at night, she wants to nurse back to sleep. If I shhh pat her back down she will often wake up 10-20min later and you have to start the process all over again. yesterday I did this 9 times before finally nursing her to sleep, and even then she only ever does stretches of max 2 hours. This all started around the 4 month sleep regression, where she was als o teething (has two teeth already!) and got sick and we had just returned from a trip. It's been almost 2 months of "something" being the reason behind her not sleeping, but I'm starting to think that it was never the teeth, sickness, or schedule changes, and perhaps more that she has gotten used to nursing to sleep after bedtime. I am at a loss! I can't figure out if it was all of these things happening at once and continuing to happen or if this is a completely separate problem. Is it something to wait out or something to work on... I have been reading so many posts and none have quite given me the ah-ha moment that I am hoping for.
This is the "schedule" I aim for but it completely depends on how her night and naps work out...
E 6:30 am wake up, try to feed change diaper
A 6:45 am play time
E: 8:20 eat change diaper read story
S 8:45
E 10:45 ( usually if we are up early) wake up, offer to nurse
A 11:00 play
E: 12:30 eat change diaper
S 1:00pm
E 2:00-2:30 (on a really good day...) wake up offer to nurse
A 2:15-2:45 play
E 3:50- 4:15 eat, change diaper
S 4-4:30
E 4:45- 5:10 wake up and offer to nurse
A 5ish play time
6:15-6:30 Bath time, stories, nurse
7:15-7:30 Bed time.
After that it's quite unpredictable... sometimes she will sleep for 2 hours and sometimes she up within 30 minutes. She flips onto her back (shes a belly sleeper) and cries out until I come. And then we continue the cycle. If it's been less than 2 hours I try really hard not to feed her back to sleep but then she will usually wake up very quickly after that. I wait anywhere from 5 mins to 15 after she falls back to sleep. I don't run right in when I hear her, I try to wait just enough time so that it won't be impossible to resettle her. I honestly have been doing so much research and trying to tweak things for the last few weeks, always slowly and giving each change a bit of time to see results. I'm getting nowhere and I'm at a breaking point from exhaustion. I feel like I just need to know if there is something I should be doing differently or if I just have to bolster myself and keep at this until she develops the ability to stay asleep.
She has also started waking at 5am some days. When she does this its sort of a gamble, she either nurses back to sleep until 7:30 which sort of uproots our whole day, but if I wake her up she screams and cries wanting to sleep, or that's just it and we are up that early.
I apologize for the novel, I just wanted to be sure that whoever answers my plea really knows that I've been working hard at this and looking through all the material I can over the last few weeks. DH's response to all of this is that she is a baby and it's normal. He can't help me at night because he has a long work commute and is renovating our house on his own so he really needs to sleep through the night.
Thank you if you've made it this far!
