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2 month year old, up every 2 hours at night :(
Zola.:
My wife and I have have been blessed with a gorgeous little boy, now 2 months old.
We are struggling at night to get him fully to sleep. He was born at only 6lbs 10oz, so he's a little man. He's now about 10lbs. We cant seem to fill him up enough at night. We try to give him a good long feed, but he only wants so much and will take himself off / cry if we try to give him more. He is always well winded and burped etc, thats not a concern. He just wakes up a lot.
A typical night is: a feed and then bed for 7pm..... 10pm another feed... then he may wake at 1am and feed to 2am, wake at 4am, feed to 5am.... and up at 6.30am.
Its hard work, I know in a few months time this may level out, but is there anything we can try to do to stretch him out at night for longer sleeps?
APowers:
This sounds well within the range of normal for a 2 month old. Not all babies sleep through the night right away, and tbh, it sucks.
If there is any way you and your wife can trade off feeding duty during the night (pump during the day, maybe?), that extra 2 hours of sleep will make a giant difference for her.
reeshau:
I agree, your baby may vary; there may be nothing to it but growing out of it. We bottle fed out of necessity, and for the nighttime bottle we added some rice cereal mixed in, to keep him content. It helped greatly for him to sleep at night.
chaskavitch:
I just got a memory on FB from when our toddler was 3 months old - "F just took a 4 hour nap at daycare. That's the longest he's ever slept at one time. Ever. WHY, daycare, WHY?!?"
So, it's unfortunately well within the typical range of new baby to only sleep for 2 hours at a time. I don't think my son slept for 4 hours at night until he was at least 6 months old. It sucks a lot, I'm sorry.
If you're breastfeeding, adding a formula bottle before bed may help give you a longer stretch. Formula takes longer to digest than breastmilk, so it keeps their little tummies full for longer (I don't have personal experience with that, but it's what I've been told, so take the second-hand advice with a grain of salt). ETA - Okits is right, 2 months is way too early for rice cereal. I wasn't specific, but I definitely mean straight formula.
If you can sleep in another room for the first 4 or 5 hours of your night, then take the baby at the 4 or 6:30 wake-up, give them a bottle of expressed breast milk or formula, and let your wife sleep for another few hours, that might help both of you a lot. Just make sure you're far enough away in your house that your wife can't hear the baby cry, or she might just lie there all morning wondering if everything is alright.
It's hard to alternate at night just because you've got to remember whose turn it is, and get up to heat up the milk/formula, and honestly, your wife will probably have a lot of trouble sleeping through that. My husband just didn't hear our son crying as immediately as I did, and I was ALWAYS awake well before he was conscious enough to roll out of bed. Taking the morning hours might be simpler.
okits:
Your son's night sleep and feeds sound totally normal, he just needs to get older so his stomach is larger and can hold more milk so he won't need to wake as often to eat.
At two months he is way too young to have rice cereal, but by six months you could give that a try.
Hopefully you can get a little help from family, friends, or hired childcare to catch up on sleep. The first few months are very tiring, you have my sympathy!
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