3-month-old, wakes up between 3am-6am just for pacifier; HELP!!!

[halbonesyjr]

Dear All,

My 3-month-old is chunky and already put herself on a 4-hour schedule (7am wakeup & eat, 8:30-11 nap, 11am eat, 12:30-2:30 or 3pm nap; 3pm eats; 4:30 catnap; 6:30pm eats; 7pm sleep for night; 10:30pm: DF). The problem is that she'll wake up a couple of times between 3am and 6am. She is not hungry (since if we feed her, she'd only eat a couple of ounces and when she wakes up at 7am she is not starving), so we don't feed her anymore overnight. I know the right thing would be to pat-shush her to sleep between 3am-6am, but we have a toddler who would wake up, so my husband and I started giving our younger one the pacifier. We got her addicted! She rarely needs the pacifier for daytime naps. But now every night, one of us will have to get up 2-3 times just to give her the pacifier. She immediately goes back to sleep; when she wakes up at 7am she is happy and not super hungry too. She tries to munch on her hands, but leaving her unswaddled goes nowhere as she flails and wakes herself up. I am preparing for PU/PD when she turns 4 months, but waiting a whole month is torture... Any ideas what we could do now? THANKS!!!

[Katet]

I wonder if the day naps are robbing from her night sleep.

She seems to sleep a lot in the day (2.5+2+ 0.5)  = about 5 hours & then sleeping from 7pm to 7am = 17 hours that's a newborn amount... 15 - 16 hours is normal for 3 months

So I'd be looking at cutting her day sleep back by at least an hour (add 15mins to each A time)  Generally speaking 4 hour A time is 2 hours sleep & 2 hours A which you may not get the A time at that yet, but definitely need to push less sleep and more awake to help her be more tired to be in a deeper sleep cycle in the early morning hours.

[halbonesyjr]

Thanks, Katet. Good idea in terms of extending our A time. We'll try it!