101 ways to settle a crying baby

Well, I wish there were 101 ways. We are using all the ones we know of, with varying degrees of success.

We think Zoe has moved into a new 'zone' where the crying and unsettledness reaches a creschendo at 6 weeks (she's now 5 weeks).

Today she has been very hard to settle after each feed, intermittently crying and looking around for up to 2 hours or more after each feed. That makes a total of 3 hours at least that she's awake. I'm obsessed with getting her to sleep as much as possible so that she can keep growing.

She also seems to want to sleep at least 1.5 or 2 hours when she does finally go to sleep, even it it means she has nearly 5 hours without being fed. This worries me a bit and means we will struggle to get the minimum of 6 feeds into her each day. But if she's taken an hour to feed, and then fussed for 2 hours, and finally falls asleep after 3 hours, I am really reluctant to wake her for another feed after she's only been asleep an hour.

As for the settling, our usual routine is to let her start to get sleepy in our arms after a feed, then up to her room to be wrapped, and then more cuddling in the dark until she actually is asleep, or almost, and then into bed.

But its now taking longer for this to work and it sets a dangerous precedent of her always having to fall asleep in our arms. We really need to get her to be able to fall asleep by herself. If she's crying a lot, we just have to hold her to calm her down. But we are now trying to put her in bed while she's still awake but calm to encourage her off to sleep on her own.

Tonight I tried talking to her and patting and rocking the bed when she cried instead of actually picking her up. It did work, but then she started crying again a few minutes after I left her. Its going to need a lot of discipline to keep doing this and not take the easy way out and pick her up. Hopefully she will get used to the idea that she's not being abandoned when we put her in bed.

One of the women at mothers group said she had some success with putting a piece of cloth that smells of her next to the baby in bed. That way, she is comforted by the smell of Mum and doesn't need to be picked up.

I think this is a great idea, but Lovely Husband is worried about putting something in the bed that she could choke on or cover her face with. We need to find a safe way to do it.

I am feeling more relaxed about my milk supply now. This morning I woke to find wet patches in the bed where I was leaking milk, so I think this is evidence of a pretty good supply and I will find it hard to have the 'professionals' keep on at me about my supply.

I am also taking a more relaxed approach to expressing now. The main goal of it is to increase my supply so its less of an issue now. My main goal in expressing is to try and get enough breast milk to supply all of Zoe's 50ml bottle top-ups, but its an uphill battle.

I don't want to express at night because I think it will make me even more exhausted than I already am. I also don't get to express when we have an outing during the day, and I think the benefit of getting out of the house outweighs the benefit of expressing. So I am doing as much pumping as I can in the mornings when I have loads of milk, very little in the afternoon when my supply is low, and then one or two more in the late evening.

That means I breastfeed 6 times minimum a day, with some additional sucking through the day, and express 2-3 times a day. Hopefully that will be fine and my supply will be ok.

All this is pretty difficult but we are trying to take things just one day at a time and making sure we don't lose sight of how gorgeous little Zoe is right now - this stage won't last very long in the grand scheme of things.