Sleep advice

[Esme78]

Our delightful daughter is just over 4 months old.

I feed her to sleep as she is unable to settle herself spontaneously and I feel her in a horizontal position on my side. I have to wait until she is in deep sleep to transfer her into our Next-to-me crib. Most of these transfers are successful, i.e. she does not wake up. Feeding at night, again in our bed is OK, but transfers to the crib are less successful so she spends most of the night past-midnight in our bed.

She naps well during the day but, again, she falls asleep on me when feeding downstairs on the sofa or upstairs on our bed and any attempt to transfer her to a Moses basket (downstairs) or crib (upstairs) are unsuccessful.

I bring my evening meal upstairs are eat in the adjacent room, much to my husband's protestation - our friends think I am obsessive mother. I am not yet ready to let her stay on our bed (prior to transfer to the crib) unsupervised for any longer than a few minutes as she is becoming more mobile now.

We have not tried a baby monitor route or a dummy. Any advice would be helpful. It would be nice to have a few hours with my husband in the evening before I turn in for the night, usually at 9pm, to get some pre-midnight sleep before she wakes up for a feed.

Thank you.

[Lovefood1984]

First of all, don’t feel guilty for not wanting to leave her unattended. For the first 6 months they recommend you are in the room for both naps and bedtime to reduce the risk of SIDS anyway. I went to bed with my daughter at 8 every night until she was 7 months as by then she was only waking once and I felt I could manage staying up a bit later with my husband. It’s whatever works best for you as a family.

I got a video monitor and love it, you can see if they have put themselves back to sleep or just check on them without having to move from the sofa or bed. I wasn’t so keen on those alarm mat things and now she’s in her big crib and rolling round everywhere it’d be pretty useless and would have been from around 7-8months old.

You’ll find now your daughter is hitting 4 months her sleep will change (their brain waves change and instead of going into deep sleep pretty much instantly they move through the sleep cycles like we do and have periods of lighter and deeper sleep) and moving her will become neigh on impossible unless she’s been asleep more than 45mins and she’ll also start to expect the same conditions 2hrs after she fell asleep as she comes out of a cycle that helped her to sleep (I.e. rocking/feeding). They don’t recommend any sleep training at such an early age but you can start to lay the foundations. The key is to put them down drowsy but awake so they drift off in the place where you want them themselves. I’d suggest you just do day naps for now and perhaps start of the night if possible as I know in the middle of the night you just need sleep and will do anything to get it. Hopefully by starting this you will see some improvement gradually (weeks not days) and she’ll learn this skill herself without too much pain. I did a lot of reading when my daughter was younger, mind you she didn’t want to be fed or rocked to sleep (I got the child that refused a bottle before bed even if it was almost 4hrs since she’d last had one 🤦🏼‍♀️) so I spent a lot of naps by her side re-assuring her she was just tired and I was there and she learnt to self settle with her thumb quite early. I felt bad at the time as to me it seemed too much like cry it out which I’d never want to do but she’d just get more worked up and tired if I held her. I’ve since found out what I was doing is actually a recommended gentler method, I guess I just got lucky.

All the best, sleep is a minefield when it comes to babies and they are all individuals x