Help! Fighting sleep already???

[c&j04]

He's 3.5 weeks old and appears to be able to keep himself from falling asleep already!? What is going on? It doesn't seem to make a difference if his bottle is formula or breastmilk. If he's held while sleeping or put in his crib. Me or DH. Home or church. One eye stays open so long after the other and when it finally blinks, he twitches and wakes up fussy. It also is quite a different kind of fussy from when his stomach hurts or he's hungry. HELP!! I need to sleep tonight

[Katigre]

What are you trying to help him sleep? How long is he going between wake-ups?

[c&j04]

Originally Posted by Katigre

What are you trying to help him sleep? How long is he going between wake-ups?

I don't think anything has really changed in our routine. Put him in a diaper, wrapped in a receiving blanket, sit in the rocking chair and give him a bottle, cuddle til he is completely relaxed and sleeping. The first couple weeks it would obviously calm him to take his clothes off so that's part of our game plan yesterday was the worst. Between 9am-4pm he was very restless and slept lightly three times for a total of 65 min. That really can't go on, right??

[SnuggleBuggles]

Honestly, with ds2 the only thing that worked was tummy sleeping. I was fine with it because during the day he slept in a bassinet in the family room and at night we co-slept. Dh hated that we were doing it but it worked so well. I just kept the areas all around him as free as possible so he had plenty of fresh air coming his way and we ran the fan at night.

eta- with ds1 I would nurse him then put him in the vibrating bouncy seat. Great success! A lot of the time I just let him sleep on my lap while he was on his Boppy pillow.

BEth

[Katigre]

At that age I found my babies slept best on me in a carrier or else in the cradle swing. We didn't do much solitary sleeping.

[Krisrich]

I HIGHLY recommend the book "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" by Marc Weissbluth.

I found that what worked for me was being very careful not to let DDs become over-tired. That meant soothing to sleep after they had only been up 1- 1.5 hours. I had to carefully watch the clock so as not to let them stay up too long. Once they were over-tired, it became so difficult to get them to sleep. Especially with DD1, who was a more "difficult" baby.