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Hi Emma,
Thanks for your reply. Really appreciate the help.
Eva’s bedtime has been 8:30pm for a while (although very recently we’ve been moving it to 8pm). We’ve been implementing the settling pyramid more persistently the last 10 days or so and her daytime naps are pretty good now but we’re still struggling with the nights. She tends to wake up about 2.5 hours after being put to sleep and it takes up to 1.5 hours until she’s properly asleep again. She will settle relatively quickly with the pyramid (10-20 minutes) but awakes 2-10 minutes later crying. We’ll then use the pyramid again and this repeats. It seems like she’s either not really asleep or in an incredibly light sleep because any tiny sound will make her stir and thrash about. After she finally goes to sleep properly (again, after up to 1.5 hours later), she will generally wake up again at something like 1:30 to feed and again at around 4/5pm for a feed. Lately it’s also been very difficult to get her back to sleep after the 4/5am feed and we end up contact napping. This pattern has been quite consistent over the last 10 days or so.
We have been seeing a great improvement in that we don’t need to rock her as much to sleep, we can get her to settle without picking her up, and she wakes up less frequently but now she tends to rely on our singing to her or parting her to fall asleep so I wonder if we’ve substituted one crutch for another?
Without rocking her to sleep, there’s also more crying in our arms or in the crib while we pat her, sometimes for a long time and it can get quite intense and sound distressed. Is that ok? In the past we’d have resorted to rocking her more vigorously or feeding her but have been restraining ourselves from that, given that she isn’t really hungry at this time.