Hello all, we have been doing shush/pat with our 4 month (18 weeks yesterday) old daughter for the past four weeks (since 7th November) with great and steadily increasing success both at bedtimes and 4 or 5 times during the night to resettle her if she has woken less than an hour after a feed. There is a lot of detail below and the long and short is - shush/pat has been going very well but for the last two days she flies into immediate crying/screaming when I lay my hand on her to start the process.
The detail:
For the first 2 weeks we continued to use our old bedtime routine - change into nighttime clothes, song, feed then into cot for sleep. This worked well but I estimated that at least two thirds of the time she was asleep by the end of the feed. However, shush pat worked well when she was either drowsy or still awake in the cot.
This prompted a change in the routine (as of Wednesday 16th) to feed, change into nighttime clothes, song then into cot for sleep. This worked better in that the occasions where she was sleep after the feed were more infrequent and, if she did fall asleep, she was generally wakened by being changed into her night time clothes. This worked with the aims of the whole exercise as I saw it which was to not allow feeding to sleep to become a prop and also to give her more practice at settling in the cot.
As I said, after the routine change things went great - the first week I started out setting her into her cot then patting & shushing her until she was asleep and for around 10 minutes after as outlined in the book. Over the course of the first week I gradually reduced the time spent patting after she fell asleep and replaced this with leaving my hand on her chest. This went well with one minor setback at the end of the week where she fell asleep almost immediately at the start of her feed then cried in her cot and was obviously still hungry. Fine - fed her again, she did not fall and then settled without fuss.
Since the first week after the change of routine went so well the goal for the next week was to do the minimum required to get her to sleep, in the full expectation I would have to shush/pat until she was settled & calm in the cot but still awake then hopefully leave my hand on her until she falls asleep. This went very well and only one night out of the first 5 nights of that week did I have to shush/pat her until calm, once she settled and fell asleep with my hand on her chest and no other shushing/patting and the remaining 3 times she was settled either with just my hand on her chest and some shushing or with some very minimal patting if she started to fuss.
On the sixth night we went through the usual routine but, when I set her in her cot and started the usual process she escalated straight into full blown crying/screaming within about 60 seconds. I spent around 10 minutes trying to settle her (she has previously taken no more than 10 minutes to stop fussing and relax in the cot during the above outlined time period) picking her up, putting her down, shushing, patting, trying to comfort her before my wife fed her again. She fell asleep during the feed and we put her back in the cot. I thought little of this as we had one setback before and everything continued to progress.
On the seventh day (yesterday) we tried to settle her in the cot for a nap around 4:30pm and had exactly the same reaction. Again I didn't pay much heed to this as I thought she may have been over tired or there was too much light etc. However, the same thing happened again in the evening at bedtime and then happened again during the night (around 4:30am, after she had finished feeding at 4am).
I'm not sure if I'm worrying unduly but I can see weeks of hard work slipping through our fingers here; progress had been consistent even through the worst depths of the 16 week sleep regression (up every hour during the night) but this seems like something else. Might she be teething? If so, why would she only start screaming when I put my hand on her?
Further information - she has learnt to roll consistently from back to front during the last week or so. My wife does not do EASY but we watch for signs of tiredness from 1h15 awake and she will always be given a nap before 2 hours awake time. Bed times are consistent with the process beginning between 6:30-6:45pm and depending on how long feeding takes being set down in the cot between 7:05-7:25pm.
Any help gratefully received.
