7/13/12

{nursing}: and nursing and nursing...

My sweet baby seems to be going through yet another growth spurt.  I think.  She's coming up on 6 weeks. so it makes sense, but it is going to drive me crazy!  She will ALMOST start to get into a schedule and then she'll go through a growth spurt and any thoughts of eating with some regularity seem to go out the window!!  Right before she was 3 weeks she was starting to sleep for 3 hour increments at night...then she went through a growth spurt and went back to eating every hour or so.  This last week she started doing 3 hour gaps again...and then last night went back to every hour or so and has been doing that all day!!  I know you shouldn't really try and schedule a breastfed infant, but I'm going to go crazy!

Paisley put herself on a schedule at about 2-ish weeks old and stuck with it for the most part.  At 3 and 6 weeks she went through 2 days of eating every hour or so but would then resume the every 3 hours schedule with a 4 hour stretch at night.  She ate at the same times every night and day.  I really thought this was normal to fall into some type of schedule!!  Stella refuses to!

We put her down at the same time every night and I wake her up at this time to feed her and we have a bedtime routine.  And we get up about the same time everyday (Paisley is a reliable alarm).  We even have a pretty normal daytime routine..Stella just eats whenever.  And I can't turn her down...!  And I know I might just need to be patient, but has anyone run into this before?  Any suggestions on trying to guide her into a schedule?  She's not even regular on what times of day she's awake...sometimes it's all morning, sometimes all afternoon and sometimes for a couple hours in the evening...

The daytime doesn't really bother me to much, it's the night time that I wish was reliable.  It was so nice to wake up with Paisley and look at the clock and know that she was just fidgeting to fidget, not because she was hungry.  And I think a good part of getting her to sleep through the night is that my body got so used to her schedule that I started to wake up before she would and feed her in her sleep so she never woke up-2 weeks of that and she was sleeping all the way through!  I would really like to establish this with Stella..but she has no set increment of time between feedings, between sleepings...anything!  I will say she generally likes to sleep at night-she isn't usually awake for long stretches unless she's upset, so that's good, but there just isn't any pattern to her waking to eat...

Anyone?  Do I just need to be patient, or is this normal and Paisley is the weirdo?

In other news, I finally did some comparisons:

Paisley
 Stella

Paisley
 Stella
So basically they are identical and totally different...

3 comments:

  1. April darling, they are both completely normal. I know it's tough (trust me I am not looking forward to it), but it will get better. If you want more sleep I would feed her ever 45 min for a couple hous before bed. Hopefully that will stretch her tummy enough to hold a couple hous worth of milk at night. Love ya!

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  2. SO. I might get tons of flack for this, but we used baby wise and let me tell you. best thing ive ever done for cali. i wasn't able to nurse her past 4 months, i lost my milk. but during the night, if she wasn't sleeping at least 3 hrs, we wouldnt get her out of bed and by the third night of doing that, she went back to sleeping 4 hours at a time. by 3 weeks old she was sleeping 8 hrs. which is unheard of, but it worked for us. i would get up and pump so i wasnt waking up with huge boobs, but she was fine. then during the day she was able to go 4 hrs between feedings. its hard to say whether a baby will pick up a routine, but its worth a try?...... of course you cant ignore a crying infant, but try and see if someone without the goods can soothe her and get her past the 2 hour mark for feedings. it will get easier :)

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  3. This is hard...I guess every baby is different although all 3 of my kids slept over 8 hrs by their 3rd week. I know I'm lucky and most people hate me. I just never woke them up if they wanted to sleep then I wasn't going to force a feeding. I would pump during the night when i got engorged. I did have a lot of patience to and defiantly by the first month you could start a schedule. I would wait to feed them at a certain time even if they started to act hungry. I didn't tolerate snacking every hr babies...ugh I wouldn't get anything done if I did. So I say it's safe to say start scheduling her feedings for the sake of both of you.

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