Nighttime Feedings

Carolether

I have a two month old baby. I feed her every two or so hours during the day. But I'm a little confused as to how often I should feed her at night. I don't wake her up to eat when she is asleep at night. But I'm having a hard time telling the difference between her being hungry at night and just waking up just because for whatever reason. I end up feeding her more than twice during the night and she doesn't even eat much as she will fall asleep fast. How often does a two month old eat at night? Because she falls asleep quickly i don't think she eats a full feed. Thanks for your responses in advance! 

lmimms87

My 2 month old wakes once at night to eat, but she is formula fed. Other moms I know with 2 month old breast fed babies are feeding once or twice at night. Usually I think STTN is based on weight more than age, so if you have a small 2 month old they may just not be ready to give up MOTN feeds. When my LO wakes unusually at night I will put her back to sleep. If she wakes up again within an hour it usually means she's hungry.

TeeJ526

My 7 week old eats twice a night at about every 4-5 hours. When she does eat, it's normally 7-10 minutes on one breast and she goes right to sleep. It seems pretty normal to me.

leela02

That sounds pretty normal as long as she doesn't have any health issues that affect her feeding. It's common for babies at this age to fall asleep at the breast/bottle.

My 2mo is formula fed and usually wakes up once after sleeping for 6-7 hrs. She wants to feed when she wakes up 99.9% of the time. Even if she was woken up by a poopy diaper or spit-up incident she won't go back to sleep if she isn't perfectly full, even if all she needs is 1oz.

Carolether

Thank you all for your responses, they really help. I'm not sure if my 2 month old should be sleeping longer at this age, because she has slept for longer stretches before but lately it seems like she is waking up exactly every two hours at night to eat. Her doctor told me to wake her up every 2 hours during the day so that she would sleep longer at night. Should I change this? 

Carolether

Thanks for the response. Its so helpful!  

lmimms87

Unless the baby is underweight I wouldn't wake during the day to feed. My LO sleeps like crap at night when she's overtired from the day.

lmimms87

Unless the baby is underweight I wouldn't wake during the day to feed. My LO sleeps like crap at night when she's overtired from the day.

Carolether

I had been waking her up during the day only after she had slept for two hours. Her ped. told me to do that, but that was when she was about two weeks old. She is now 9 weeks old. I think as she got older she hasn't been napping for very long, maybe 30-40 min. so i usually try to put her back to sleep. is this normal? I'm definitely not waking her up during the day anymore! Did any of you go through this? She sleeps fine at night though, but still not sleeping 'through the night' at least it hasn't been very consistent. 

leela02

My DD is also 9wo and her pedi also tells us to not let her nap for more than 2hrs at a time during the day and keep her up 2-3hrs before we want to put her to bed. I stopped doing that because it just makes her cranky and fight bedtime at night! I would stop it if it just makes things worse or doesn't make a difference on how she sleeps at night. My DD pretty consistently sleeps 6-7hrs at night but the time we can get her to sleep varies depending on how well she naps. On days when she refuses to nap she fights bedtime until she wipes out at midnight which is awful. At this age babies need a lot of sleep anyway.