elfadair

My almost 6 month year old is a brilliant sleeper but for the last week has started thrashing about in her sleep. She is not actually waking up but is whacking the mattress so hard with her legs the whole cot is shaking. She is waking me up about once an hour all through the night. It's v unsettling for me, but doesn't seem to be bothering her - she wakes up in the morning her usual happy self. I was really scared the first night and spent a long time watching her to make sure she wasn't actually having a fit. She seems to be flinging her legs about and moving her head from side to side (reminding me of the girl in The Exorcist!!). Does anyone know what may be causing this - I thought maybe teething, growing pains, nightmares, room too cold, some kind of brain development phase? We haven't started weaning yet and there has been no change to her routine/daytime naps. Is it worth a trip to the GP/health visitor, or will they just tell me "it's normal..." Any thoughts much appreciated.

I agree with Princess on naps - with me its whatever works to get the night right. Definitely a GF-lite approach though, so depends on how much you want to follow GF. And that goes for feeding too. She started needing day feeds more frequently after we dropped the nightime, which over the course of the day meant an additional feed (which made up for the dropped late-night feed in terms of total volume of food).

This sounds a bit like us. I say just go for it - drop the feed and keep your fingers crossed! My baby (4.5 months) fell into Gina's nightime routine by accident from about 6 weeks. We used to wake her up before we headed to bed (11-11:30pm) to feed, then she'd sleep until about 6-7am. A few weeks ago she started becoming un-wakeable at 11pm. After a couple of nights of falling asleep during the feed and one night of puking up the whole thing I decided to risk it and not wake her. It was all fine!!! Since then she has woken up anywhere between 5:30am and 7:30am (today - yah!), but I've found she is not actually starving hungry when she wakes. When she wakes at 5:30am I can hear her playing in her cot. The first couple of mornings I lept up, worried that she was wasting away, but now I leave her and have found she'll either go back to sleep after a play or gets bored and wants to get up (and then 10 mins later decides she wants to eat) Basically she seems to have an adult sleeping pattern (I know I'm never hungry when I first wake up, but then get hungry after a bit). Sounds like your baby is the same. She is not a GF baby during the day - she eats absolutely loads frequently during the day and has 3 or 4 cat naps of 30-45mins (can't make her sleep for any longer than that!) Both of these may have a lot to do with the night time but to be honest I just think its her body chemistry/genes (me and her Dad were always big sleepers)