Troubleshooting sleep - Part II

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We thought it wouldn't get much worse than hourly wake-ups at night.

Here comes month 4.5, after the FL trip with the airplane and 3h time shift, plus all the excitement over the holidays. Mara has been waking up erratically at roughly 20min intervals throughout the past three nights. That, of course, on top of the hourly wakeups that by now mommy has started accepting as normal nighttime behavior.



Mommy and Daddy are trying to figure out why, some of the ideas so far are:
  1. She's too cold/hot cause we have a room heater that's inconsistent (it runs till it's 3 degrees over the temperature, then stops till 3 degrees under! that's 6 degrees of variation!!)
    Does anyone have a recommendation for a room heater that would be better? 
  2. She's bothered by the random status lights in the room - baby monitor, room heater, clock, fire alarm. Everything else we had already ducktape-covered.
    Late last night a tired daddy was covering the heater and monitor lights. We only have the clock remaining to keep mommy's sanity in check :-)
  3. She's going through "the switch" and her sleep cycles are transforming from 1h to 1.5h so the transitions between light and deep sleep are more irregular.
  4. Over the past few weeks we've been switching the nighttime feedings to sidelined instead of cradle hold to help mommy sleep more. Now baby only wants to sleep when cozy next to mommy and complains every time mommy tries to extract herself.
    This seems also correlated with Mara not wanting to be held by other people anymore. Recently, several friends have tried to hold her and it resulted in heavy tears within the first minute. She's definitely a lot more clingy to mommy.
  5. Naps are a lot shorter than they were in December - 20-30min mostly and with lots of wakeups. The sleep book we have by Elisabeth Pantley mentions that the longer they nap in the day, the better they sleep at night. Plan for the next few weeks: focus on longer, more consistent naps.
  6. Establish a regular feeding schedule. We've heard to always go 3 hours between feedings consistently and that might help.

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