Would appreciate advice on 3.5 month old sleep....

[Loshea16]

Hi there! This is my first post so I look forward to seeing if anyone could help out my husband and I. We have a 3.5 month old little boy and his name is Lincoln. He is bottle fed and receives 4.5 ounces every three hours, but we give him 5 oz at his 6 pm and 9 pm bottles. Lincoln is a total catnapper so he only gets about 1.5 hours of sleep during the day. So when he comes home from daycare he is wiped. Our night schdule goes like this. We feed his 5 oz at 6 pm and he goes straight to bed. He sleeps until 9:00 pm and we wake him up, give him a bath and massage. We then feed him 5 oz again and he goes right back down. He then sleeps consistently until 2:30-4:00 am. He wakes up anywhere in that time. I feed him 4.5 oz and put him back down. He does fight it sometimes but he does go back to sleep. The issue we are having is from the middle of the night bottle to his 6:00 wake time. He literally only goes back to sleep for about an hour and wakes. I then rock him until 6:00 in his room. We aren't sure how to adjust feeding to keep him sleeping through the night but to also try to reach that 6:00 am wake time. Any thoughts!?!

[jessmum46]

Hi, and welcome!  Hope that we can help you out

A couple of things I can suggest - first is that you actually just put him down for the night at 6pm.  We roughly work on a 12h day and night, so I wonder if that waking him fully at 9pm is not helping and perhaps compounding the over tiredness from daycare?  Can you move the bath to earlier on in the evening, or alternatively the morning if you have more time then?  There's no reason it has to happen at night   I understand perhaps wanting to give him a feed around that time, but the way we usually suggest is to do a dreamfeed around 3-4h after going to bed for the night (9-10pm for you) which means you literally feed in their sleep.  For most bottle fed babies this isn't too difficult - although you may need to play around with timings to catch him in a period when he isn't deeply asleep.  I can ask for someone with bottle feeding experience to give you some more tips on this if you'd like (mine were breastfed so a bit different)?  The alternative would be put him down at 6pm and just see when he wakes?  I would expect him to need 2-3 feeds total between 6pm and 6am at this age so it's likely even if you do the dreamfeed you will need to get up at least once more - but it won't be forever I promise

With his feeds it sounds like you are right on track, actually.  The general advice with bottles is if he is draining the bottle to add another oz to ensure he stops feeding when no longer hungry, but amounts sound fairly good to me.  Over the next month or so you may want/need to think about moving towards 4 hourly feeds (same amount of milk but spread over fewer bottles) but this will in part be determined by how much he can handle at a time.

Those early morning wakings - you may find if you change the 9pm waking that they get better on their own.  I would generally expect wakings at that hour to be due to over tiredness - or sometimes discomfort - rather than hunger if he has had a full feed between 2.30-4am.  It may be that until he is a bit bigger and/or sleeps a bit better in the day that the early mornings will be a bit hit and miss.  Does he get really upset or is he just awake?  Does he need you to intervene?

[KBolton]

Hiya,

My 3 month old doesn't nap well in general but night sleeps seem to go well. If she is exhausted from the day I move her bed time forward, as she's so overtired it will take her a while to get to sleep and she needs to catch up on some rest. As he's bottle fed, he should be able to go longer between feeds than breast fed babies. I breast feed and suppliment with formula and I have managed to get the below routine for the evenings.

4:45pm start feed (half)
5:10pm bath time (nice and relaxing)
5:35pm second half of feed
6pm wind down routine
Sleep anywhere from 6pm to 7pm
11pm dream feed (lights low, no eye contact)
11:45pm sleep
6am-7am wake

The dream feeds work well for us, and she seems to realise it's not playtime and takes herself back to sleep quickly. We originally woke her at 9pm but gradually moved it later. This breaks the sleep into 2 and stops her waking at 4am. If your timings don't allow for a bath at night, I think the previous suggestion of morning bath would work well.

I notice that she sleeps best if she's had a good amount to eat during the day. If she's fussed during a feed due to tiredness it can impact her night time sleep. If she's overtired she only feeds small amounts and wants feeding more regularly and it's a nightmare to get her to eat a full meal. Is he finishing his bottles?

Best of luck, I hope this helps
Kirstin