night time help

[p&e]

hi there-

we have been ec'ing 5.5 month old babe since a few wks old and things are going well during the daytime. night-time ec has been harder. seems like she used to wake and pee much less a few months ago, and now she has settled into a groove of kicks and squirms with a pee every 1-2 hours and needing to nurse to get back to sleep with each wake up. anyone with suggestions about how to help her move thru this frequent wake-up period? we're more tired now than we were at the beginning. isn't her bladder supposed to be getting larger? she used to be able to go 5 hours without peeing or waking up and i would give anything to revisit that. am i somehow training her to wake up every two hours to pee when she can really go in longer stretches???

thanks, p&e

[cmg]

We're still up every couple hours, so no real help, but at the risk of sounding obvious, water in equals water out so if you're nursing back to sleep.... Do you nurse straight to sleep? I've found doing heavy feeding an hour or so before bed time, then getting her to pee 2-3 times before lightly nursing to sleep helps a little.

I've also seen lots of posts where babies start feeding more often at night because they're too busy during the day to eat enough. Could this be happening to you?

What happens if you ignore the wiggling for a few minutes to see if she'll go back to sleep on her own?

[p&e]

we do a heavy nurse straight to sleep for her 45 minute "pre-sleep", then just a little more to push her over to real sleep when she wakes up. first pees don't usually come for a few hours. i just read about the "reverse cycling" so will pay attention and see if this might be part of it. i'm only away from her for 4-5 hours one day a week. sometimes we go places during the day where there is a lot of activity and she gets very interested/distracted, so might be nursing less and making up for it at night.

when she squirms and wakes up night and nurses back, it's not usually a long thing, but disrupts our/my sleep nonetheless. not sure how long i have let her try to settle on her own-- i'll bet it's not very long, but it is to the max of my comfort level. feels like she used to be better able to get herself back to sleep.
things were really dandy until after the three month mark when she kind of "woke up" and became a real squirmcake at night.

thanks for the ideas