newborn and sleeping at night

my DD is 5 days old and every night since we've brought her home from the hospital she is up wide awake between 10pm - 1/1:30am. she's not gassy. she's just fussy and fidgety and cant seem to get comfortable. if we rock her in our arms, she'll fall asleep but then as soon as we put her down she's wide awake again. she gets a bottle at 1am-ish and then she's asleep for about 4-5 hours after that.

she has no problems sleeping during the day and i wake her every 3 hours to eat and she's already taking in 2.5-3oz at every feeding.

is this typical? any suggestions on what we can do to help her sleep in that time frame at night?

Re: newborn and sleeping at night

This is very normal as newborns have a reverse sleep cycle (if you can even call it that). If you think about it during the day you're most active....all of your movement rocks the baby to sleep when inside of you. And at night you're the most calm, with the least amount of movement...this is when the baby is awake. So it would make a lot of sense that your baby is awake at night (or later at night) and sleepy during the day. Eventually that will correct itself and by establishing a difference between day sleep (keeping the house noisy and with a lot of light) and night sleep (low lights, limiting noise and any stimulation) you're baby will on a good sleep cycle in no time.

Re: newborn and sleeping at night

Just give it time. Sounds like you're already doing very well. The first 6 weeks are the hardest.

If you're already getting 4-5 hours of sleep at once from her, that's amazing. We weren't even allowed to do that until DD was 2 weeks old. (She was losing so much weight we had to wake her every 2-3 to feed, even overnight.)

That 1 am bedtime will continue to get earlier and earlier. But it's going to take a while. It's fabulous that you're already getting a longer stretch and it's at night!