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I feel for you! It really is hard when they are awake at night, or in my case at 4 or 5 in the morning, just to be awake.
Bleh, nightwakings really suck. Soimetimes you just get so tired, you can't even function; yep, I remember it well. Hold on, momma; it'll get better soon.
Is she sleeping a lot during the day? If she is you may have to start trying to keep her awake for longer periods of time, and don't let her go to sleep so early.
As long as she has a clean diaper and you know she is not hungry and you have checked her blankets and sheets to make sure there are no wrinkles or bumps irritating her, you can just let her be.
If you have a mobile above her bed and it has a music box, try turning that on and leaving the room.
My daughter was like this, and sometimes, she would just want to gurgle and coo or cry and then she would fall asleep.
You may have to let her cry a bit. By now you can probably tell the difference between her cries, so you should be able to tell if she really needs your attention or not. She will cry herself to sleep, if that is what she needs to do.
Unless she is working herself up with her cries, she will be fine. I had to let my daughter cry for a couple of nights before she would sleep. I would leave my daughter's door open just a crack and then check on her to make sure she was okay when I did this.
It will probably break your heart; like it did mine, but sometimes babies just need to cry and work out their own sleep schedule and know that you will come to them when they need you. I would actually sit outside my daughter's door and do the "silent cry" while she was getting herself back to sleep.
I also gave her a teansy bit of pablum before I put her down at night and that seemed to help; not too much; just enough to make her happy. She might not be hungry for formula, but she might be hungry for something else that will stick to her. I only did this after a couple of nights of me crying outside her door. It was my last resort because the doctors said she wasn't old enough for pablum/cereal yet, but I was desperate, so I had to try it.
I agree with noritake that if the baby sleeps a lot during the day then its harder for them to sleep through the entire night. My sis in law used to add banana flakes to her babies formula at night so it was thicker and more filling and he would sleep all the way till about 6.30am which was pretty impressive considering he used to wake up multiple times each night
@noritake22:@bells: Nope, she doens't sleep much during the day either. She is 6 months and 2 weeks old and is struggling between 2 and 3 naps. She usually sleep for between 2-3 hours during the day. She is not fussy during the day unless she's tired and when I put her down she hardly cried if at all to fall asleep. We dont' use any sleep aides at all so she can obviously self soothe. We have a fan on in her room for a little bit of white noise and some familiar blankets in her crib for the texture (per a sleep book I read.) She wakes up anywhere from 1-4 times between 7 and 7. We do pretty much exactly the same thing between 4 pm and bedtime every day. We've tried CIO, modified CIO, not CIO, literally everything when she wakes up in the middle of the night.
@camrie: I'm starting to believe this is LITERALLY the only explanation since I have tried everything in the past 3 months.
Oh and she is on solids 2x a day so she is definitely full at bedtime.
Maybe you should keep her up later and see how she does? Maybe she's cold with the fan blowing on her? Maybe the simple noise of the fan is keeping her awake and doing the opposite of what you think its doing?
Is she teething?
@smyley: I've also tried keeping her up later! :) She is worse!
We don't actually have the fan blowing on her and I'm not sure it bothers her because we've had it running as long as I can remember and she USED to be a good sleeper! :)
It's definitely possible she is teething. And I think she's trying to walk, even though she has NO balance! She has gotten 2 teeth, learned to sit independently, learned to crawl and learned how to pull herself up to standing in the past month!
Just when you think you have them figured out, they throw you for a loop. Is she slobbering a lot and has her fingers in her mouth all the time? Teeth hurt when they come in, and some just don't deal with it very well. :(
Mine used to sleep 12 hours from 6 weeks old, but I know that isn't very common. I used to work with 2 women whose kids didn't sleep through the night until they were 3. I'd have been dead by then.
I think you just have to experiment sometimes and try whatever you can think of to try. Some like motion to fall asleep,some like noise,some like complete quiet. Mine loved the swing and would drift off in minutes. I always ended their nights with a warm bath and then a feeding and cuddling.
Keep trying other things, and you'll figure it out. Have you checked with your Dr. for anything you can try?
@smyley: yeah she has the two bottom ones and she's had drool and her hand in her mouth since like 2 months! :) I feel like I've tried everything! The Dr. said to try a dream feed and that makes literally NO difference at all and we stopped doing it. Maybe my next baby will be a good sleeper! :)
I might try without the fan tonight to see...it's literally the only thing I've though of to try that I haven't! I'm sure worried she'll hear all the noise when we go to bed since the floors are REALLY squeaky!
@dchokiebride3: I guess for some people teething lasts a few nights, and that's it, but it WAS NOT that way for us! Teething for us lasted, literally, months per tooth. Months 6-9 were the worst for us (she woke up pretty much every single night, and most nights she was up 2+ times) and she got 8 teeth in during that time. It wasn't like she was in a ton of pain, she just couldn't put herself back to sleep after waking. We didn't want to give her Tylenol every night (and even that didn't work all the time), so we ended up rocking her to sleep, sometimes giving her a bottle, etc... We had weeks on end where she would wake up 4 or more times a night, and then she would get a little better (maybe only 1 nightwaking) for a while, and then we'd be back to being up with her 4+ times in a night. It was awful, and we couldn't figure out why she was waking up.
Addie now has 12 teeth, and she hasn't gotten any more in since her first birthday. Low and behold, as soon as she stopped getting teeth, she started STTN all by herself! She wakes up maybe once every two weeks, and can't get back to sleep without our help, but otherwise, she's silent for 10-11 hours a night. It's heaven!
Keep trying things, but just know that you're doing the best you can. And this too shall pass. I know it seems endless sometimes, but it will eventually get better.
@Mrs. Spring:Thanks for the vote of confidence! It's really wearing on me, a ton. I was just reading through my AAP book I got from my husband's boss and some other sleep/baby books I've read. I think almost all of them say baby 'SHOULD" be sleeping 10-12 hours straight and 6 months and she definitely shouldn't need to eat. This makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong...therefore crying for the past hour. Maybe I just need to stop feeding her. I don't actually feed her more than once a night, and I usually let her cry for at least 10 minutes before I'll even go check on her because I'm pretty sure she doens't need anything. I don't know but I kinda feel hopeless.
@dchokiebride3: You are definitely not doing anything wrong! Every baby is different, and just because your baby doesn't fit into those guidelines, doesn't mean you're doing something wrong or creating bad habits, or any of the other crap people say. Some babies do need to eat in the middle of the night, and Kayla might be one of them. I'm not entirely sure Addie actually needed her middle of the night bottles after 7 or 8 months, but it comforted her and helped her go back to sleep, so I continued doing it. When she didn't need it anymore, she stopped, without us forcing the issue.
Trust your instincts as best you can. There will definitely be times that you get incredibly frustrated and nothing seems to work and you don't know what else to do, but try and keep the faith in yourself. You know your baby best. Also, try and share the work with your hubby. I do 99% of the night parenting (mostly because I have a hard time giving up control :) but there were nights when I was so worn out and so frustrated that I was completely ineffective in getting Addie to sleep. Those nights, my husband was my savior, and he was able to get Addie back to bed when I couldn't. I should have relied on him more; I probably wouldn't have had such a tough time.
Also, most people disagree with me on this, but I really don't believe in creating bad habits at this age, for most kids. I think when kids are developmentally ready to do something, they'll do it on their own with very little assistance. Even though it was extremely hard to deal with sleepless, endless nights, I am comforted by the fact that we gave Addie the time and space to develop on her own. We never pushed her too hard to sleep through the night, and she did it on her own timetable. Yes, some kids are probably ready to STTN at 6 months, but I bet the majority aren't. And the fact that you've tried a million different methods and nothing seems to be working indicates to me that she might just not be ready yet. So do what you can, for now, and wait it out a little longer. Chances are, SOMETHING is keeping her up at night, and once that issue is reduced or resolved, she'll start sleeping a lot better, all on her own.
@Mrs. Spring: This is great advice! My son didn't sleep through the night until he was 10 months old and every time we cut a tooth we would revert back to several wake ups a night. I agree that they will do it when they are ready.
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and she's not dirty, then why the hell is she waking up so often during the night? I think I'm going to be clinically insane before she starts sleeping better. Ugh, just venting.