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Hi Emma
Thanks so much for responding so quickly and in so much detail – this support is unbelievable!
In answer to your questions:
- Is the 3 am wake-up the only time she wakes up during the night? Or does she wake up at other times, but just has a feed and falls back to sleep quickly?
She wakes up at other times for a feed and then falls back to sleep quickly.
- Where do you usually feed her during these night wake-ups? What’s the setting like—do you keep the lights on or off, and do you change her diaper?
She is in a next to me cot so I just pick her up and feed her in bed. I don’t turn any lights on. We only to a nappy change when she wakes around midnight, and I just leave it till the morning after that. I have tried changing her when she won’t go back to sleep in that 3-5am wake up, just in case she’s uncomfortable, but it makes no difference and generally she doesn’t mind being in a soggy nappy.
- Could you also share what her daytime nap schedule looks like—both the times and the duration of the naps?
He daytime nap schedule is really varied – I haven’t worked out any correlation with these two things yet. She usually has three fairly long naps a day – two 90min-two hour ones and then maybe a 30-45min one which takes us up to two hours before her bedtime of 7:30pm. We try to stop her napping by 5:30pm at the latest, but sometimes she ends up with her last nap finishing nearer 4:30pm or earlier.
Agh, the feeding to sleep is so hard. I wish I’d known before that it could be a difficult crutch! Is there a way to tell the difference between feeding to sleep need and genuine hunger but falling asleep whilst feeding? She does often come off the breast and settle, but I definitely feed her to sleep throughout her nighttime wakings.
Our routine at the minute is bath, into pjs and fresh nappy, then feed in bed with lights dim and white noise on, put her in her sleeping bag and continue feeding till she’s had enough or till she falls asleep. I’ve been trying to feed her a bit before the bath but sometimes she’s not hungry and sometimes is doesn’t make a difference anyway! I wonder if I could still do a feed before bath if she’ll take it, bath, pjs and nappy, and then bring her into the bedroom fully lit, do the final feed then close blinds, turn off lights, put her in her sleeping bag and turn on white noise and see how that goes? We are also combi feeding but she tends to want to have her last feed as a breast feed, probably because it helps her sleep.
One other question. When she is waking overnight, I maybe am too quick to respond, but she always wakes up immediately crying. There’s rarely a gristle before she’s crying out. How long should I pause? A lot of the time I worry that if I pause too long she’ll go into overdrive because she is already crying!
Soooo many questions, thank you so much for your help!
Maddie