Are these two times feeling very familiar to you?! If yes, you are not alone. 11:00pm and 3:00am are the two times overnight where we see a shift in one sleep cycle to another.
It is important to know that for a younger baby, under the age of about 6months this can be a normal ‘feed time’ where they are cycling through one phase of sleep to another but calling out for a genuine hunger feed. Over the age of 6months though we can often see these wakes as more as a habitual wake and in fact a ‘resettling’ association has formed. This means that likely, your baby is waking and ‘looking’ for something external that has either helped them to fall asleep at bedtime (dummy, feed, rocking, patting) or your baby is a great little self-settler at bedtime but is now reliant on that ‘something’ to pop them back to sleep again overnight. This same pattern will happen again about 4hours later (hello 3am!) for that same call out/circumstance to happen. Because it has been a number of hours we can assume it’s hunger and offer the feed which in turn creates a new ‘feed to sleep’ pattern for your baby.
To help figure out if your baby is genuinely hungry, we would look at what is happening for the first morning feed. Usually, if having a little too much milk overnight, they will wake up and have a tiny bit of milk before becoming distracted/playful or just not interest in their morning feed. If this is the case, we would be looking at starting to shift some of those night time calories back into their day. The idea is that we want your baby to wake up from night sleep with a great appetite for their first morning feed!
If you are feeling stuck or unsure of how exactly to do this, we’ve got you! This is what we do each day, we help families get out of those ‘patterns’ that keep babies waking up at night and help teach them to sleep soundly and start drifting between their sleep cycles when it’s not hunger related.
Reach out for a chat or we have all the information you need in your amazing sleep guides!
