I’m trying to EBF my 10 week old baby, but it’s been really hard. For nearly 2 weeks now he rarely sleeps longer than a 2 hour stretch, including during the night. If he wakes in the night and I go to nurse him, he falls asleep after just a few minutes of nursing. Changing his diaper between breasts either doesn’t help him to nurse more or wakes him up too much and he’s very difficult to get back to sleep. Getting him to nap well during the day has also been very hard, he usually only sleeps for ~30 minutes before waking again.
Last night he woke up at 2:30 AM after having been asleep for maybe 1.5 hours. He didn’t want to nurse but was wide awake, so I gave him a bottle of formula to try to get him back to sleep. He drank 4oz over the course of an hour and I finally got him back to sleep a little after 4 AM. He proceeded to sleep for 3 hours, which is the longest stretch in quite some time. When he woke he would only nurse for 3 minutes and then fussed when I tried to get him to nurse more.
I’m just feeling very demoralized. I’m running on fumes from sleeping so little for so long, but I don’t know how to get him to sleep for longer stretches. I don’t want to have to give him bottles. I realize this period of poor sleep may be developmental more than anything I’m doing wrong, but I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.