Any way to get a 5 week old baby

abatherapist

Thu, Feb 16 2017, 9:47 pm

Any way to get a 5 week old baby to settle down for the night before 1 am? baby only takes brief naps until about 1 am... then he starts sleeping 4 hr stretches through the night. any way to get him to go into night mode a bit earlier?

amother

Gold

Thu, Feb 16 2017, 10:00 pm

Too bad

I thought this thread was going to be about getting a 5 week old baby and I'm dying to adopt a newborn. If anyone has a spare baby, I want him or her. THanks!!

amother

Ivory

Thu, Feb 16 2017, 10:05 pm

amother wrote:

Too bad

I thought this thread was going to be about getting a 5 week old baby and I'm dying to adopt a newborn. If anyone has a spare baby, I want him or her. THanks!!

It had me thinking along thoes lines too...

greenfire

Thu, Feb 16 2017, 10:05 pm

nope ~ infants are finicky

amother

Floralwhite

Thu, Feb 16 2017, 10:44 pm

The baby whisperer starts her methods at birth. Worth checking out.

Iymnok

Fri, Feb 17 2017, 3:04 am

Don't let her nap after six. It worked for some of my kids, but later, close to three months l

smilealot

Fri, Feb 17 2017, 4:59 am

amother wrote:

Too bad

I thought this thread was going to be about getting a 5 week old baby and I'm dying to adopt a newborn. If anyone has a spare baby, I want him or her. THanks!!

I thought the same. 😊
Try Gina Ford. Those that do her routine bless her loads.

FranticFrummie

Fri, Feb 17 2017, 6:44 am

LOL, good luck with that! Babies sleep when their bodies tell them to.

Just be grateful you're not dealing with colic. DD screamed bloody murder from 7pm to 5am every single night for the first 8 weeks. We started calling 7pm "the screaming hour", because it always started right on time. I was actually scared the neighbors would call CPS on us, because you could hear her all the way to the street.

We nicknamed her "The Screamapillar".

gp2.0

Fri, Feb 17 2017, 9:56 am

The general rule with newborns is that they mostly sleep 2-3 hours at a time, but once every 24 hours they sleep a 5-6 hour stretch. As they get older that 5-6 hours stretches out to 6-7 hours, 7-8 hours, until they're sleeping through the night.

So IME, if the baby slept a longer stretch during the day, that was it. That was their "night." By 5 weeks I'd be careful not to let the baby sleep longer than 3 hours during the daytime, so they save that long stretch for night time.

And remember a newborn's "night" is usually around 6 hours. That means 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. or 1 a.m. to 7 a.m.

In the newborn stage I would put my baby to sleep at 9, she'd wake up at 12 to nurse, then sleep until 6, and she was up for the day until her first morning nap around 9.

MyUsername

Sat, Feb 18 2017, 1:48 pm

My kid was like this as a baby. Babies are jet lagged when they are born (seriously). It took her forever to figure it out. And it takes all babies time. But, at some point, we found something to help move it along.

I read some sleep research book which said that babies' bodies' natural night and day rhythms were not clicking because they are in bright indoor light most of the time, including the evening - the pattern of darkness setting in during evening is a major sleep cue for melatonin release (your body's way of making you sleepy). So we simulated evening and morning, in the sense of the lights getting dimmer or brighter - About an hour before bedtime, we would dim the lights in the room she was in, so she got the hint that it was evening, and we'd open the window shades in the morning about 30-60 minutes before her regular waketime. Importantly, we initially set bedtime and waketime when she was normally going to bed (so start with 1 AM in your case) and waking up (around noon or later waketime for my baby originally). So we made it dark an hour before the baby's current bedtime (around 12 am for you) for a few days and kept the lights dark or very dim, all night, until about half an hour before the baby's current waketime in the morning when we would make it light (the sleep research said bedtime and waketime should be approximately 12 hours apart, give or take an hour or so - this worked for us, so shoot for 12 PM (noon) for waketime). Then, after a few days of that, in the morning we'd open the shades about 15 minutes before we normally did and also wake her up 15 minutes before her normal wake time - we also moved her feedings up 15 minutes, so that her whole schedule shifted, which was easy when we woke her earlier anyway, then that night we made it get dark about 15 minutes earlier than before and put her to bed 15 minutes earlier. Then after a few more days, we moved everything another 15 minutes earlier, and then every few days moved everything up 15 minutes again until we hit the desired bedtime and waketime. The sleep research said that you can't control the bedtime without controlling the waketime - which is why it's important to adjust both in parallel, and that feeding times are a major time cue for human beings in general, so shift those as well. Anyway, within just a few weeks, our daughter went from going to bed at 1 AM to going to be around 8:30 or 9 PM and waking up midmorning, which seemed reasonable to me at the time. By the time she was 6 months old, she went to bed at 7 every night and woke up around 7 every morning (waking up for feedings in the middle obviously, but going right back to sleep after eating).

cinnamon

Sat, Feb 18 2017, 2:56 pm

You can try swaddling to help him sleep longer at around nine pm. That worked amazing with one of my kids. Not so much with my current newborn. The only thing that works with him is co sleeping. He'll sleep when I sleep instead of me sleeping when the baby sleeps...