way too early for me!

[Anonymous]

My son is 5 months old and wakes up every morning between 2 and 3:30. Usually he is looking around and alert like it is 7 am. I try to resettle him in his crib but he ends up screaming in frustration because he wants to get up! He goes to bed around 8 or 9 and wakes up a couple of times just for the pacifier. But at 3 , when I give him the pacifier, he just spits it out and cannot resettle. I used to think that he was in pain because when I put him in bed with me at 3 am he starts yelling and crying. But I am beginning to think that he is frustrated because he wants to be out and about, not in bed with a sleepy mama. I just lay there with my eyes clothes as he yells and hits my face. Finally, after an hour or 1 1/2 hours or so of crying with me in bed, he goes back to sleep till 7am. I try to hold him and rock him gently and it works some times. I know he is not hungry at the 3 am mark because he does not wake up hungry at 7. At 7 he is smiling and happy like he got enough sleep. He is no longer in pain during the day and drinks his milk no problem (thank goodness!) He naps 3-4 times a day for 40-50 min. at a time. Do you think my son wakes up in pain at 3 am or do you think that he is just the kind of baby that does not need that much sleep. If he goes to bed at 9pm, by 3am he has had 6 hours of sleep. Add in the 3 1/2 hours of sleep during the day and that is around 10 hours of sleep in total. Does this sound familiar to anyone? What do you think I should do?

Thank you in advance!

[Anonymous]

A very strange thing for us is that if we put Colton to bed late he gets up really early, If we put him to bed around 7:00pm he sleeps until 7:00am. I know that there are other mom’s on this board who have had the same problems and they put their baby to bed earlier.

[Anonymous]

My little guy did the same thing, but for him I think it was the break through acid. I think that is a very common waking time for reflux babies, but I could be wrong about that. Maybe someone else could say for sure.

[hellbennt]

I would experiment a bit…

I would try some mylanta at 2 or 3am.

also, I would give a larger ‘portion’ of medication in the evening

tell us your med schedule & I can tell you what I mean- for ex: if it’s 15 mgs of prevacid a day, I would try to figure out how to give maybe 3/4 of the solutab in the evening- something like that-

Also, I would keep it dark and say shhhhhhhhhhhh, night night….

(you’re probably already doing this)

I would also try moving bed time…

if drastically moving it doesn’t work, then try slooowly moving it earlier,

day by day…

I do NOT think that he ‘just doesn’t need that much sleep’- babies need sleep…and, sleep begets sleep…so, if you could get napping better (yeah right! Jonah was Sir No Nap!), then maybe it’d help the night time as well…

[Anonymous]

I agree with the above posts – sleep begets sleep. It sounds strange, and goes against what you would normally think, but putting them to bed earlier often helps them sleep better and longer. Perhaps try bumping his bedtime up 30 minutes earlier and see if that makes a difference, and then maybe an hour earlier. At that age, my son often went to bed around 7:30 and got up at 7:30 in the morning (up briefly once or twice to eat in the night).

A good book about babies and sleep is “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child” by Marc Weissbluth (although his is really off base when he says reflux pain doesn’t wake a baby). It has great tips about sleep training, and a good explanation of the ‘biology’ of sleep.

[Anonymous]

Fernando takes 15 mg of prevacid (solutabs) in the morning and 2 ml of Zantac at night. This is the schedule the GI told us to do. I tried cutting the solutab in half but it crumbled and made a mess.

[Anonymous]

Just a couple of thoughts —

I would tend to think that reflux pain is waking him up at night because 10 hours of sleep is really not that much for that age…I think the avg is about 15 hours…but anything’s possible. If you’d rather not split the solutab, maybe try giving the Zantac in the a.m. and the solutab at night for about a week and see what happens.

Also, you mentioned that he usually naps about 45 minutes, which means he’s probably just sleeping through one sleep cycle and not transitioning into the next for one reason or another. How does he wake up from his naps? Is it with a “bang?” For both my boys, when their reflux wasn’t completely under control, they would wake up at the 45-minute mark with a sudden scream or loud sobbing. But when their reflux was under control, they would easily sleep past the 45-minute point. And the weird thing is — and maybe this is unusual — there was a point for both my boys when they could be generally very happy during the day and seem fine, so their reflux was being managed fairly well. But with another dosage increase (say, from 15 mg to 22.5 mg or even 30 mg), the reflux pain was completely under control, meaning that even when they lied down to sleep, it didn’t bother them and they could nap well. It seems that for babies, any kind of pain (earache, reflux, or whatever), is always worse when they’re in the bed and the distractions of the day are gone. I say all that to simply ask, is it possible he needs a dosage increase? If you think so, maybe give him 22.5 mg for a few days and if you see improvement, call the doc and ask for a new Rx.

Last thing — if you don’t think Fernando is in pain, maybe it’s time to start trying to get him to fall asleep on his own for every nap and at bedtime every night, if you’ve not already done this. To me, this is a very helpful thing because once my sons were putting themselves to sleep, I knew they must be in pain when they’d wake up crying and not be able to fall back to sleep….but maybe that’s just us?

Just wanted to give you a few ideas that will hopefully help.

[Anonymous]

I was reading through this yesterday and found your advice on sleeping. Thank you sooooo much. My little guy would also wake up very early, like 2-3 am and scream until about 6 or 7 am. I’d try to give him a bottle and he’d fight and scream for hours. It ws very puzling to me because my dd started sleeping through the night at about 4 weeks. Last night, I tried giving him a dose of Mylanta when he woke at 2:30. He took it, and went right back to sleep without even wanting a bottle. Why didn’t I think of this?? Thank you, thank you!! This is the first full (almost) night’s sleep I’ve gotten since Nicholas was born 8 weeks ago. AMEN!

[Anonymous]

I should also mention that Nicholas LOVES to be held and would not sleep except in someone’s arms. Which was fine for awhile, but I have developed terrible shoulder and neck pain in the past week from this. I determined maybe it’s the warmth of being in someone’s arms or my smell?? So I carreid around one of his blankets yesterday. When I swaddled him for bed, it was in this blanket. My dh put his bassinett wedge in the dryer for about 20 min. The wedge has a feature that bumps like a heartbeat and I turned on his womb bear. So along with the Mylanta, maybe this helped because he thought he was sleeping with me??

[hellbennt]

oh, I’ve been known to throw one of my smelly T-shirts in the crib!

glad the mylanta helped!

for luzaria: you might want to try a pill cutter to cut the solutab so you can give it in 2 doses…

[Author]

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