Help - need advice from experienced moms!!
So, I am a first time mom to my beautiful, active 3 month old daughter. We have been swaddling her since birth using a swaddleme, and she has been a great sleeper until recently... Since she was 6 weeks old she has been sleeping from around 9 pm to 5 am, getting up to eat, then going right back to sleep until around 8:30 am. The last week or so she has been "breaking out" of her swaddle (usually just arms, but sometimes arms and legs!) and when she does this she wakes up at around 1:30 am to eat. Last night she did this, went back to sleep until 6 am (again broke out of the swaddle) and she didn't want to go back to sleep, which basically wrecked our whole morning because she was tired and cranky from being up too early.
Anyway, so I basically need advice on what to do... should I stop swaddling her? If I keep swaddling is there a way to keep her from wiggling her arms out? Her swaddleme says it goes up to 14 lbs and she is only 11, so I don't think she needs a bigger one...
Re: Help - need advice from experienced moms!!
We had a similar issue with our DS at about 2.5 months. We ended up quitting the swaddle cold turkey. The first few nights were tough, but then he ended up sleeping better than ever! By a little over 3 months he was STTN consistently for 12+ hours
Are you sure she is hungry when she wakes up at 1:30am? That was the toughest part for me. It would have been SO easy to just nurse him back to sleep when he busted out of the swaddle, but I knew he wasn't hungry. He had already STTN with the swaddle.
So we just tried to soothe and calm him by singing and rocking. It worked - the wakings decreased and he eventually just slept through
GL to you!
DS 3.12.08
DD 7.11.09
DD 8.01.13
My husband has been taking the 1:30 am shift and I have been taking the 5-6 am shift, so I don't know for myself that she is hungry, but I told him to give her the pacifier first and see if that would work to get her back to sleep, and it never seems to... he always ends up giving her a bottle. Maybe tonight if she wakes up again at 1:30 I will take that shift and see if I can get her back to sleep without feeding her...
Thanks for the advice! Hopefully we will start getting sleep again soon. :-)
I agree, at this point she may not be hungry- it may just be out of habit. See how you do with it tonight. Another suggestion- have you tried putting her in a sleep sack instead of a swaddle? DD HAATED being swaddled from Day 1, so we used sleep sacks. Most that I have seen are fleece, but I believe they are some that are just cotton.
Good luck!
Christmas PJ's!
I actually went out and bought a bigger swaddleme today to see if that will help as well (at this point I am desperate!) because even though she doesn't come close to the weight limit on the small one, she is really long and her legs could no longer stretch out.
She has also been trying to turn over a lot during the day, and while swaddled in her crib at night, which I read online can sometimes cause babies who were sleeping through the night to wake up until they master turning over. (I keep hoping she'll get it soon) So hopefully she'll turn over, the bigger swaddleme will work, or I can get her used to going back to sleep without eating... I miss sleep :-)
DS 3.12.08
DD 7.11.09
DD 8.01.13
Thanks :-)
So here is the update: After working hard on it all day, Samantha (finally) rolled over last night right before bed, and then proceeded to sleep until 6:15 this morning! She did manage to get her arm out of the swaddleme, but then she rolled onto her side and went right back to sleep. I don't know if that's considered ok by the "back to sleep" crowd, but I wasn't about to go up there and wake her up by putting her on her back again. So hopefully the whole waking up in the middle of the night thing was due to her trying to roll over, and hopefully we are back to sleeping through the night...
Thank you for all the advice!!