Tricks for longer night stretches?

[gym_class_hero]

My LO is 8 weeks….we have sporadically gotten a 4.5-5.5hr stretch of sleep in the last few days—though not really at ideal times, one was 5:30pm-10:30pm and then there was a nice one a few days back that was 12:30-5. Last night his stretches were only 2.5-3. Sometimes he also had a hard time going back down overnight leaving me awake for a two hour chunk trying to soothe him and get him back asleep (last night thankfully wasn’t this, 1hr was the longest it took to get him back)
I will also add that he usually naps/sleeps 6am-9ish and then I consider that up for the day

As your babies were moving to sleeping longer did it go in and out of it or was it consistent once it started? Any tips/suggestions to try and get stretches a. Longer and b. More overnight?

I’m mostly been trying to just follow his cue up until now, I know he’s still a bit too young for a schedule and maybe he’s too young for longer stretches?

 

[rapaines]

@gym_class_hero The first thing that’s going to consolidate night sleep is shifting calories to daytime. Both my kids were eating about 24 oz a day in the 12-13 daytime hours after 2 months and naturally started sleeping through the night at 10 weeks. Once they started consistently sleeping a certain long stretch at night and I knew they were getting a lot during the day, I also responded to night wakings by trying to soothe in other ways like paci or patting and shushing, instead of just immediately offering a bottle. A lot of the time that’s all they needed to go back to sleep.

 

[greg32]

@rapaines Were you waking them up to eat during the day to make sure they got all those ounces in? My 7 week old sometimes wakes up to eat every 2 hours, other times it will be 3/3.5 hours and she’s still knocked out from her nap. Trying to decide if it’s worth waking her up more often during the day if it means we’ll all get to sleep longer at night! Lol

 

[nihilsinedeo]

@greg32 I mentioned this in another comment, but I'd say yes, you can wake her up if it's time to feed. We've established a schedule that works for us (we hold it loosely, though, so we can still respond to her cues).

Basically, we do a bottle, change, and then some wake time until she's showing signs of sleepiness, at which point we put her down for a nap. We have an idea of when the next bottle will be already. If she's still asleep at that point, we wake her up for her bottle.

Basically, we know how many feedings we need in a day. We start our schedule based on when we want the last one to be, and work backwards from there. If she's scheduled to eat at 6:00pm, 8:30pm, and 10:30pm, we don't want her to sleep past the 6pm feeding because then that throws off the rest of the night.

 

[rapaines]

@greg32 Mine never really napped longer than 2 or maybe 2.5 hours once he was a month old, so I didn’t really have to. I would wake personally if it had been 3.5 hours since last feed.

 

[nihilsinedeo]

@rapaines Yeah, this is key. Just shy of three months, we've got six feedings per day, 5oz each. We try to pack them in during the day so she's not getting hungry overnight.

The other thing I'd add is that I don't think 8 weeks is too early to start working on a schedule, as long as you're not too strict about it--you still need to read baby's cues and respond. Figure out how much he should be eating in a day, how much he can take at one time, and use that to calculate total number of feedings. Then try to work out a schedule that more or less works for you, with longer stretches at night.

At 8 weeks, our feeding schedule was something like this:

• 6:30 am
• 9:30 am
• 12:00 pm
• 3:00 pm
• 6:00 pm
• 8:30 pm
• 10:30 pm
• 2:30 am

So that's 8 feedings per day, with 2-4 hours between each feeding. Bunching the feedings up closer together in the evening, though, meant we got longer stretches at night -- 4 hours between the 10:30 and 2:30 bottles, then another 4 hours between 2:30 and 6:30.

As I said, be attentive to baby's cues and respond as needed--especially if they're just SO HUNGRY that they can't wait for the next feeding. But you can absolutely wake them from a nap if it's time to eat. Might be in for a rough couple of days when you're trying to establish a pattern, but it's totally worth it (3 month old is sleeping through the night now, as we were able to drop our overnight bottle sessions). If you can keep to something like this (within 30 minutes or so of your scheduled feedings), it goes a long way towards establishing good habits.

 

[saintozano]

@gym_class_hero Our 10 week old usually has one good 5 hour stretch per night, so we try to time it so hubs and I each get optimal sleep. He usually has last "bedtime" bottle at about 7pm, then we wake him up to eat again at 10. He'll sleep until about 3 or 4, then the day starts with his 7am-ish feed. I am not a stickler for a schedule, but it is kind of nice to have a bit of predictability now!

 

[dtom]

@gym_class_hero My son started as a newborn with 2 hour stretched and by 4 months started the night with a 4 hour stretch then every 2 hours. Then by the time he was 5.5 months old he was waking up every 30min to 60min until he was 10 months old. That about broke us…and then he started doing 2-3 hour stretches again until 15 months when he slept better and now at 24 months he’s sleeping through the night most nights.
I am really really praying and hoping my newborn doesn’t put us through that BS!

My only tip for you is to not have any high expectations or any at all, because their sleep is sooo all over the place until around 18 months. It’s all developmental, and time is the only thing that helps overall. As long as there isn’t any medical things or environmental things going on that you can change or help, you really can’t do much else. Oh and sleep training isn’t always the answer!