night/day confusion

adelepickle

My DS has been home from the NICU for over 3 weeks now. He is still not on a sleep schedule. He sleeps most of the day and then wakes up at 4pm and then falls back asleep, only to get up and stay up most of the night starting around 9pm.

Everyone I have talked to has said that I should keep him up during the day. My question is how?? How do you keep a 6 week old baby up? I vacuum and he sleeps. We go out and he sleeps. Other people hold him and he sleeps....

 Any advice will help!! 

KellyMichelle

My DS was like that too.  We made sure to keep the house really bright during the day - curtains open, lights on - and very dark at night.  He adjusted pretty quickly after doing that.

At1stsight

KellyMichelle:

My DS was like that too.  We made sure to keep the house really bright during the day - curtains open, lights on - and very dark at night.  He adjusted pretty quickly after doing that.

This is a good start. DS had day/night confusion as well for the first few weeks. During the day, it was all lights on, curtains open, etc. and if he was sleeping longer than 2 or 2.5 hours, I would actually wake him if possible. At night, I learned how to do everything with indirect light (turned on the hall light but not the light in the nursery), added a sound machine, and stopped talking completely at night. The key is to help them distinguish between awake time and sleep time - during the day, keep things bright, be animated, and wake if necessary at this point once he's slept longer than 2 hrs. At night, keep it dark, quiet/white noise only, and minimize diaper changes as much as possible since those really wake them up a lot. GL!

AlishaMay

Our LO's are just starting to differentiate between their days and nights.  In addition to the above, we've had good luck with keeping them unswaddled (or loosely swaddled) during the day, and snuggly swaddled at night.  I find that this helps keep them up more during the day, and nice and relaxed at night.