u/batteredbins

9.5 week old, EBF.

For the past few weeks (except one glorious night where he slept two 3 hour stretches) our baby has been waking up hourly, usually at almost exactly 1 hour 5 minutes.

My husband is incredible and is definitely doing what he can, but with the baby being EBF many of the wakeups have to be handled by me. We tried expressing so I could get a longer stretch of sleep, but a) I’d need to pump at the same time as the feed to keep up supply so it felt a bit pointless and b) I wake up to the baby screaming anyway. At the weekends it’s not so bad as he can take the baby in the day so I can sleep, but when he’s working we can’t do that. He always takes him early in the morning to give me a bit of sleep but after a night of only sleeping for 30 mins at a time it’s just not enough to make up for it. Last night we just gave up and held him all night, taking shifts. He will sleep for a few hours if held. Thats obviously not sustainable. We’ve tried cosleeping, but he still woke as frequently. We’ve also tried capping his daytime sleep and not capping his daytime sleep, neither seemed to make a difference.

I know it’s normal for babies to wake frequently overnight but every hour is absolutely killing me. I’m starting to feel dangerously low and am noticing small hallucinations in the corners of my eyes.

I’m really desperate for anything that might help, or at least reassurance that this won’t go on forever, and might even resolve soon and not in several months or years down the line. We really can’t do this anymore.

FTM, EBF 7 week old baby.

We introduced pumping once a day 2 weeks ago because I was really struggling with the lack of sleep. I would pump at some time in the morning in between feeds and my husband would do one overnight feed, meaning I could sleep for 3/4hrs at once - only once a 5hr stretch between feeds. This was working well, but over the past week baby has become incredibly fussy, first just on the right boob and now both. He doesn’t seem satisfied after most feeds and screams and screams, but if I try and give him the nipple he just spits it out. This cycle continues basically until he’s exhausted and falls asleep. I’m wondering if pumping at a different time to the bottle feed has tanked my supply? If that’s the case, what’s the point of pumping if I’ll still have to wake up to replace the feed? And how can I get my supply back up to what it was and make my baby full again 😭 He’s still having plenty of wet and dirty nappies.