It is something I never even heard of until I started reading the bump. We never experienced this, thankfully, and she actually started STTN during her fourth month.
i *think* its when your LO more or less starts discovered things, a major developmental time in his/her life. They wake up at night and want to play..or something. DD never went through it, but Ive heard horror stories.
I haven't done much research... but our experience was that about a week after LO turned 4 months, he woke up at 3 am for about 3 nights in a row. He went right back to sleep after feeding him, but he usually doesn't wake up until 6 or 7am. After 3 nights, it went back to normal. Not sure if it was the 4 month wakeful or what, but it's the only time he's done this.
DD went through a major sleep regression at 3 mo. Here's our experience, but I think ours was more severe then the norm (not rare, but maybe not average). She went from waking once a night and going back to sleep easily to waking every 3 hours and taking an hour to get back to sleep (so only sleeping 2 hours straight). She also began fighting naps like it was her job and could no longer sleep with any type of noise or distractions. She woke like clock work (I swear she had an alarm clock under that crib) at midnight, 3 am and 6 am for 6 weeks. We never sleep trained and after 6 weeks she slowly resumed sleeping longer periods again, similar to how she had as a newborn. She finally began STTN at 7 mo, again without sleep training.
Re: 4 month wakeful - tell me about it....
It is something I never even heard of until I started reading the bump. We never experienced this, thankfully, and she actually started STTN during her fourth month.
Maybe you will get lucky, too.