cranky at night

[poger67]

Our 4 1/2 month old baby girl has started to have real problems sleeping through the night. For the last month or so, she'd make it through the entire night with maybe one feeding / diaper change around 2:00am. Starting this week though she's become increasingly cranky and waking up several times throughout the night.

Two nights ago it was a disaster. She woke up around 1:30am and started to cry and scream. This turned into an incosleable wailing for almost 3 hours. We tried everything in the book that we know of - sitting with her quietly, walking around, laying with her and watching tv, feeding, diaper changes, make it warmer in the room, make it cooler in the room - nothing worked. When she gets going, she's becoming difficult to hold because she arches her back so hard and kicks with her legs. At around 4:30 or so she finally settled down, took a bottle and went to sleep.

Last night wasn't as bad, but it was not good. Maybe 1.5 hours of crying. She would fall asleep and I'd hold her an extra 10 minutes to make sure she was asleep, lay her down, climb back into bed and then 5 minutes later she'd be crying again.

She has been a bit congested this week so we've been using saline and suction, along with a plug-in vicks vaporizer. We have seen some signs of teething - chewing on the nipple, extra drooly and have been using infant tylenol as needed.

This week we did change her forumla from the similac fussy baby to the similac soy formula thinking that maybe she was a bit lactose intolerant. This has seemed to make it worse so we'll be going back to the milk based similac today. We did also start to feed her some cereal with her formula this week.

I'm sure this is something that every parent goes through but darn it's tough! What makes it worse is my wife is starting a new job on Monday and is already stressed from that. I can usually work from home so it's not as difficult on me, but she's difficult to convince to go back to bed and let me deal with cranky baby.

Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated!

[Bamamom]

I'd have her checked for an ear infection. Anytime my kids wake up at night and are fussy like that (especially given that she's been snuffy anyway) they have an ear infection.

Hope yall get some sleep soon!