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Newborn: sleeping & comfort

False starts? Bedtime sleep

Hi, I’m really at the end of my tether now. I really can’t cope anymore my little girls sleep is really affecting me.

Abit of background to help you all understand

She is 4 months and from birth to 4 months we have always been in a bedtime routine. I have always let her go to bed when she feels is right which was around 11pm quite late but it suited her at the time. From 3-4 months this bed time has got earlier starting first at around 10pm and the past few weeks this has dropped to mainly 9:30 with the occasional 9pm sleep.

Her sleep pattern going off the past few weeks would be she goes down very easily no fuss with her bottle at 9:30 and does a stretch of sleep till around 3:30am. Then she wakes but drowsy and we dream feed her which takes around 15 mins. She then usually settled down from around 4am until around 8/8:30am.

This past week has been an absolute nightmare and also during the day this baby is not the same baby.

To start with the night time which is the most frustrating. She had a 2 hour wake window before bed and she only has around 30 minutes on her last nap before bed. We ain’t to put her down around 9:30 which is 2 hours after her last nap as she get very ratty anything over 2 hours. She has been screaming the house down going to bed, very unsettled, wet hard to rest her, doesn’t want to be rocked, refuses milk sometimes, doesn’t want her dummy and will only settle after around 45 mins with very firm bum pats and a lot of messing around.

Then!!
Between 30-45 minutes she has a false start and wakes up either fully or partially. This then has been taking another hour and halfish to get her back down settled for the night and then so officially didn’t get back down for sleep until around 11pm I believe.

Last night she then woke up at 3:30 screaming crying and out of character she fully woke and screamed until 5:20 this morning to which this point my partner was dealing with her!

Now this morning she has woken up at her usual wake time of 8:30 hence her being awake for over a total of 3 hours during the night and I am now stuck on how to treat today… do I make her naps longer? Because she won’t hit her total day sleep over 24H? Do I shorten her wake windows? So she can have little and often naps? Do I bring her bedtime forward which when could lead to under tiredness and prevent the false starts?

Moving on to during the day generally speaking she has 4 naps per day and 3 should be 1 hour or just slightly over and the last nap about 30-40 minutes.

We wake up, she’s fine, gets ratty after hour and half wake windows so I don’t push it past that. She goes down usually for her first nap very well and has around an hour.

Sometimes she can wake out of these naps quite early, sometimes she can have over an hour it’s all pot luck on the day. Recently her 2nd to 4th naps she has been very hard to get down, a lot of screaming, stiffening herself up, just very irrational and erratic behaviour. Takes sometimes 30 mins to put down for a nap.

When I mentioned behaviour has changed she is squawking and screeching through the day, losing interest in activities she would usual like for a longer period of time and just screaming when she has been awake only 20/30 minutes, she’s been changed, burped, fed to what she will take, played with her and been silly.

Temp last night was 35.8 and usually her temp sits between 36.9 and 37.5.

Poos have been inconsistent past week, usually it’s every morning without doubt now it’s later in the day and then she’s going in the evening also. All sorts of different colours. First one is dark green and the other mix between changing to mustard colour and back to dark green again.

(To sum up, my main concerns here are)

-How to stop these false starts at bedtime?

-How do I go about the next day after she has had a terrible night sleep?
…Wake windows? Naps? Bed time?

- is there something I’m doing wrong during the day that’s not suiting her and affecting her night sleep?