Five week old baby night and day mixed up

mother1231

Sat, May 07 2016, 10:07 pm

My five week old sleeps most of the day and is up from 11 till 3:30 am Confused

. Any advice how to get her on a normal schedule? Tia

5mom

Sat, May 07 2016, 10:21 pm

Mazal tov on your new baby!
First, she's very very small and new to the world. Give her time.
Next, do what you can to make nights quiet and dark. Keep her swaddled and speak softly, if at all. In daytime, open the shades, speak at normal levels etc so she learns the difference between night and day.
And the traditional advice: rest when she sleeps, take care of you yourself, and hang in there. This too shall pass.

imasinger

Sun, May 08 2016, 1:29 am

The thing that I found worked the best was to wake a baby every 2 hours or so to nurse during the day, and to nurse extra in the early to mid evening.

Some young infants sleep during the day because they are overstimulated, and are shutting down. These babies do better to have some daytime gentle attention in a dim, quiet room. Others do better in more vigorous surroundings, and might stay awake longer if taken outside (while being held, not in a stroller) for a walk, or to go shopping, etc.

In either case, if baby is awake more in the day, she will learn to stretch more a night. When she wants a nighttime feeding, try limiting eye contact, and don't talk to her. Make it clear that you are only attendng to business until daytime. And then, in the day, give her lots of attention, and limit naptime. She'll catch on.

sunshine5

Sun, May 08 2016, 1:37 am

Mazel tov.
What worked for me, daytime nap was either infant seat or bouncer and nightime was in the crib. Daytime nap in brightly lit room krainy fays open lights) and night time dark room.
Good luck.

amother

Chartreuse

Sun, May 08 2016, 2:39 am

I used to nurse my babies extra in the evening hours towards the night or give them a bottle at night and then most of them slept through the night

amother

Navy

Sun, May 08 2016, 5:58 am

Move to Australia Idea

finprof

Sun, May 08 2016, 7:07 am

Its normal and it sucks but they do grow out of it in time. I second the advice about napping in a different location with lots of light during the day.

bookie

Sun, May 08 2016, 7:49 am

Just to give you hope, ,my baby is eleven weeks. She was like this in the beginning. I did nothing to change it and she has been on a normal schedule for few werks already.

amother

Orange

Sun, May 08 2016, 10:26 am

My baby also 5 wks and doesn't sleep long stretches at night but cries during day also. Bathing before putting to sleep is supposed to help and teach them that bath means night. I think 5 wks is too young to teach anything. But I'm wondering when is the right time

MyUsername

Sun, May 08 2016, 4:02 pm

Sounds just like my baby. 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 wa 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 11 PM in your case? For our baby, she didn't think it was night until 1 AM) 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 11 pm 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 11 AM 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 totally 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) and has slept from 7 PM - 7 AM almost every day since she was 6 months old.