Hi all
My DD is 21 weeks today, and we started her on the EASY four-hour routine two weeks ago.
She took really well to it, and has been much happier with longer and more regular naps during the day. At first I didn't introduce the dreamfeed, as the last time I had tried it (many weeks ago) it didn't help. So we just stuck with bedtime around 7.30pm and waking once around 3.30am for a feed. She would then sleep happily until 7.30am.
After about four days I thought I would try introducing the DF as everything else was working out so well.
Since then her night wakings have got worse and worse. At first she was only waking around 3-4am, which I assumed was habitual from the previous night feeds. However, she then began to wake every hour after this, and a few days later she also started waking at 2.30am. Last night she also woke at 12.30am! She just seems to be waking more and more often as the days pass.
When she does wake her daddy goes in to re-settle her with sh-pat. Initially she was settling back to sleep fairly quickly (within five mins), but recently she has taken longer, and also required some PU/PD. One of last night's wakings took thirty minutes to settle. It's just getting worse and I don't see any progress at all.
She is doing really well during the day though, with two naps of 1.5-2 hours, and a catnap of 45 mins in the late afternoon. Mostly with the longer naps I have to sh-pat her back to sleep after 45 mins, but this never takes very long, and she sleeps soundly afterward.
I'm worried that these bad nights will start to have a detrimental effect on her daytime naps.
It feels as though the DF is interrupting her deep sleep - previously the 7pm-4am slot was her longest chunk of sleep, but now I break this with the DF, and this seems to throw her out for the rest of the night (she is breastfed, so it's really hard to give her the DF without waking her).
I am now wanting to give up on the DF completely and go back to the early morning feed that we used to do, just so that we can all get some better quality of sleep back again.
Unless any of you can persuade me otherwise??
Thanks!
