Discovery Home & Health

I have a 8 week old and find she wants to be held all the time.I know she is still very young but I can not put her down for more than 10 mins awake before she is crying to be held. She is clean feed and played with but still is not content to lay on her mat or moses basket, I have a 7 year old son and held him always and rocked him off to sleep I do not want to do this again HELP..............

My little boy went through exactly the same stage at 8 weeks - I thought I would never be able to put him down! I thought it was colic, but I'm sure now that he was just hungry. He was having another growth spurt - he had one at 3 weeks and 6 weeks so I wasn't expecting another one at 8 weeks!! I was breast feeding him "on demand" every 3-4 hours day & night, he was a happy little chap in the mornings and most of the day, but when it got to about 4.00pm he would get himself into a state and like your baby, would cry if I put him down. This would go on for 3-4 hours until both he and I were exhausted. Just to make life interesting, he also started to refuse milk (expressed or formula) from a bottle. We had been giving him his last feed before "bedtime" from a bottle since he was 6 weeks old - just to keep our options open and get his Dad involved with the feeding! - and he'd taken it quite happily. By 8 weeks however he would scream at the sight of a bottle, so I thought he couldn't be hungry. Also I didn't want him to "use Mummy as a dummy" so wasn't offering him more breastfeeds than he'd been having for the previous couple of weeks. After a week of the teatime hell and several bottles of Dentinox/Gripe Water/etc I changed tack. For 3 days I made sure there was no longer than 2 and a half hours between feeds, then over the next week started to leave it longer until we were back to 3-4 hour gaps and the problem seemed to have gone! It was knackering at the time, but it worked. Now at 18 weeks He's on 4 feeds a day, sleeps for 12 hours a night and happily takes a bottle if it's offered!

Hi clarliemac thanks for your replie.Your experience sounds just like what is happening now I too am feeding on demand every 2hours ish morning and night.She is sleeping for about 2 hours in the day, then about 7-8 ish she will fall asleep after a fight, and will sleep 2 hours solid and then wake for her 2 hour feeds thoughout the night. I am now hoping after reading your replie that in a few more weeks she will be sleeping a bit longer.Also when I breast feed she only feeds for about 5 to 10 minutes, but when I express and I can see she has had 4-5 onz she takes sometimes up to a hour to finish her feed. I am sure it will all fall into a routine in the end.

Hi Joanne, I'm glad my reply was helpful. I'm sure your little one will settle in a few weeks. If she's like my little boy, the same thing will happen when she's about 12 weeks old - but at least by them her stomach will be bigger than a walnut so she'll be able to fill herself up for longer! With Tom, the bigger feeds during the day were also the begining of him sleeping for longer at night, so having a hungry baby has it's advantages! CharlieMac