Hi svitra
First up, congratulations on the new addition to your beautiful family🙂.
As you'd know, through personal experience, it can be far from easy when motherhood's not straight forward. It can be like 'No one prepared me for these challenges'. So, first of all we need to give our self credit for trying to manage what we were never prepared for. Next, there's the need to question and research what we were never prepared for. I'm glad you've come here in your search for answers.
While my babies are now 19 and 22, I can still recall some of the struggles I faced when they were actual babies. It's hard when the person you're trying to help or manage life with is non verbal. It then becomes about any form of behavior being a form of communication (including a baby's cry). If we weren't able to speak what would our cry relate to, in regard to not being able to get to sleep? Discomfort (regarding clothing, room temperature etc), hunger, pain, over stimulation (too much going on in the environment or a stimulant in what we've consumed before sleep, such as caffeine)? If there are no stimulants in the breast milk a baby's receiving, such as caffeine for example, that one can be ruled out.
When my babies weren't able to sleep, I faced 2 different reasons. The first related to hunger, something your mum touched on in regard to increasing the feeds. I had so much trouble breast feeding both my kids. I didn't realise that they were starving. One of the ways to manage seeing how much a baby is getting through breast feeding comes down to having the baby weighed before and after a feed (something my health centre sister did for me). The second reason for one of my babies not being able to get to sleep related to pain. Thinking I was doing the right thing, I changed the formula they were on to a higher standard (from basic to 'Gold' standard). Apparently there was something in the new formula that their body did not like, something that caused them great discomfort. After wondering whether the formula could be a problem, I changed back to the basic one and everything was good after that.
Something BlueLily mentions is the need for sleep, for you. Serious sleep deprivation can mess with us mentally and physically. Sleep deprivation is still used as a form of torture in some parts of the world. One of the main reasons I stopped at 2 kids involved the sleep deprivation factor. It can have some seriously depressing side effects the longer it goes on and it can make it really hard to think straight, especially when it comes to problem solving.
Again, give yourself the credit you deserve. You're trying to manage what other parents have never had to manage. ❤️
