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Hi Emma – thank you so much for your response.
To answer your questions:
- Her bedtime does vary. I try to keep it pretty close to 7pm, but it might sometimes be 7.30 or 8pm depending on when she last woke up from her final nap. Sometimes if her final nap is a little earlier I will stretch out her final wake window to 3hrs or maybe even 3.5hrs for a 7pm bedtime.
- Wake ups – Sometimes she might wake to feed at 4.50am then rustle around in bed till about 6.30am when she will fall asleep again for an hour or two. Fairly often she does still wake up around 6am-6.30am, sometimes 7am.
- She ends up sleeping in all sorts of positions these days. She rolls around A LOT when she goes down. Sometimes it might take her a while to fall asleep, and I can see on the monitor she does a lot of rolling & inch-worming around the bed or the cot (cot for day naps, big bed with me for night sleep). She falls asleep on tummy, back, or side. Over the past week she has quite often wriggled her way over to me in the night where she is snuggled in quite close – I’m not sure if it’s from getting cold in the night, or “smelling milk” (?), or just wanting to snuggle with mama. When I put her back over to her side I put a few blankets on her for warmth and that seems to work.
- Yes her bedtime routine is the same. For the night time routine I have also added at the start putting on her night nappy & getting her into her pj’s. I get her to choose out of two different coloured pyjamas which one she wants. This differentiates the night time sleep from the daytime naps. For the feeds I feed when she wakes. Sometimes I will feed an hour or half hour before she goes back down. If she hasn’t had much of a feed before her night sleep, she often wakes after an hour or so, I go in, keep everything dark, keep the white noise on, feed her (she usually falls asleep), put her back on the bed & leave.
- Her last nap time varies – as some days all her naps are 45mins-1hr, other days she has an hour & a half with two 50min naps (or a long nap & two short ones), some of her naps have been getting long recently – 2hrs45, 2hrs15, 2hrs. So the naps are a bit all over the place depending on how long each one is. Final nap times have varied from 3.30pm, 5.15pm, 3.50pm, 5pm, sometimes even a bit later. If the nap has been quite late, she will kick around on the bed after being put down for the night sometimes for an hour or so. Generally she is pretty happy and eventually falls asleep, or eventually cries so I will feed her, then she will sleep.
- When I feed her in the night I have my phone on the bedside table. I flick the phone flashlight on, but it is face down – so the light is very muffled by the table surface. I do that when I pick her up and put her down so I can see a little. Sometimes I have the light off completely during feeding. I’m not sure she wakes up really during the night feeds – I don’t really let her get too restless/upset to a point where she might fully wake – but sometimes in the early morning feeds I think she is kind of half awake when she rustles around for an hour or so after a feed (aka 4.30/5am-6/6.30am).
- The last few nights the longest stretch of sleep has been 3hrs, and she is waking around 5 times in the night.
Two days ago (Sunday): slept 6.38am-7.28am, 50mins
First nap- 9.40-10.30am, 50mins
Second nap- 1.30-3.30pm, 2hrs
Bedtime- 7.06pm-8pm first wake-feed, 54mins
Second sleep period- 8.08pm-10.11pm, 2h3m
Third sleep period- 10.22-1.22am, 3hrs<div>
Fourth sleep period- 1.34-3.33am, 1h59m
Fifth sleep period- 3.44-4.55am, 1h11m
Final sleep period- 5.05-6.06am, 1h1m</div><div>
She used to sleep nice long stretches and only wake up twice in the night for feeds. If I try and pat & shush her in the night to calm her she just starts to cry more – so I feed her. For a short period around the time I first messaged you, she was waking additionally in the night and I was able to pat her back to sleep without a feed. This seems to be different.
But then last week (Thursday) this was the sleep-wake:
Final night sleep: 5.32-6.20am, 48mins
First nap: 8.11-9.39am, 1h27m
Second nap: 11.56-12.46, 50m
Third nap: 2.52-3.52pm, 1hr
Bedtime: 6.41pm-12.13am, 5h32m sleep
Second sleep period: 12.26-3.08am, 2h42m
Third sleep period: 3.21-6.01am, 2h39m
So the nights and days really are kind of all over the place. The most consistent I can try for is her bedtime, but sometimes she is still awake for an hour or so after being put down.
Before the change her night sleep was generally bedtime 6.50pm-ish, she would sleep till around midnight or 1am, wake for a feed, sleep, then wake again maybe at 3 or 4am, maybe 4.30am, then sleep again till about 6.20am. She has not had a night like that since the 8th of December.
Thank you so much. I am eager to hear your insights on this!
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