What is my baby doing? need advice
mzovoce
member
Brooks will be 7 weeks tomorrow. Last week he dropped his midnight feeding and went to only a 2 & 4am feeding overnight. This week he has sort of dropped his 4 am feeding, but is making crazy noises.
He's not waking up, but is wimpering, almost crying, but not rooting. He also grunts, and moves his legs and arms during this time. At first I didn't know what was going on, so I feed him as usual, but he only nursed for 3-4 minutes.
We're cosleeping, so when he has done this 4am wimpering time, I brought him in closer to me and wrapped my arm around him since he was moving around in an effort to keep him still, sort of swaddeling him with my arm and body.
He still nurses like a champ, so I'm not concerned that he's not getting enough food. I also have gotten up and changed him, but nothing else about this behavior changed, (if you can call it behavior). The noises he makes are loud enough that I'm not able to fall back to sleep which is really rough, especially since they last about 2 hours.
He wakes about 2 hours after the initial fussiness starts and nurses as usual. He also does not do any of this during any of his naps during the day. Please help oh wise ones.
Re: What is my baby doing? need advice
I've heard that around the 6-7 wk mark many babies start to sleep longer (hence dropping a feeding)
Otherwise, Sprout also does the fussing-and-kicking-but-still-asleep thing. It's really hard to sleep while he's doing it. I have no idea what the deal is other than, for him, it seems to happen when he needs to poop or has gas. But I'm not even sure if that's a cause or just coincidence.
Sounds like normal sleep phases to me - I think the sleep books I've read say babies that age go through a sleep cycle around every ~ 45 minutes and sometimes lightly wake up and would do the same things you mention - make noise and move around. I can't remember which sleep book compared it to adults turning over and readjusting the pillow, etc.
DS is a loud sleeper, especially between 4-6 am, when he has a few of these "false starts." For me, it took awhile but I was able to differentiate between waking up and not, and go back to sleep. When DS moved to the crib then I was able to turn down the monitor.
Sorry it's waking you up - that's unfair, especially if he's sleeping longer stretches!
precisely why i am a co-sleeping failure! we co-slept for 6 weeks when T started with the noisy sleeping. i wasn't getting any rest at all between that and his normal wakes for feeding/changing, so he got booted to his crib.
sounds perfectly normal to me.