Newborn sleep is, even at the best of times, erratic. You’re looking at usually no more than three or four hours at a time between wakings, and even once your baby starts sleeping through the night you’re still probably only looking at five or six hours.
The good news is that, by the age of 3 months or so, your baby has developed a regular sleeping and waking pattern. Also during this period, it’s pretty likely that she’s going to drop her nighttime feedings, or at least most of them.
Having said that, you can’t create a rigid schedule for your 3-month-old baby. Chances are pretty good that your baby is going to create his own schedule, regardless of whether you like it or not and regardless of whether it fits with your family life.
Take heart, however. At this stage, you can start to do some sleep training. You can do any number of things, from swaddling to using white noise sounds, to help your baby fall asleep and stay asleep longer.
During this stage, your baby will be capable of sleeping through the night – usually six or seven hours. You shouldn’t expect to be able to go eight or nine hours yet, but those six or seven hours in a row will help you feel much more rested each morning.
You also need to know that a baby that’s slept through the night for weeks at a time may one day just start waking up again every couple of hours It could be that she’s starting to be aware of you, and wants to see you. It could just be that she’s trying to master sitting up or rolling over, and while she’s practicing them in her sleep she wakes up.
By the end of this stage, at the age of 6 months or so, your baby is likely to be ready to wean off of nighttime feedings. Looking ahead, this means good things for both you and your baby, and a much higher quality of sleep for everyone.