Sleep and rolling

[RaquelDee]

Hoping someone has some suggestions to help me and Bub through her current rolling phase, which is starting to play havoc with her sleep. She is 4.5 months and has been a good night sleeper although pretty poor for daytime naps. She is also a very enthusiastic roller from back to tummy, which she recently has also started doing in the cot, all the time.

The problem is that while she is super at getting from back to tummy, she won't roll back. When she's playing she puts all her energy into trying to move forward, and when she runs out of steam she collapses face down and cries. She doesn't seem comfortable resting on her tummy and doesn't understand that she can turn her head to one side and simply lay there.

Obviously, when she's playing it's not a huge issue and I can just flip her back, but it's interfering with her sleep too. I've been tucking her legs down with a thin sheet to get her to sleep in the first place (otherwise it's a constant pattern of roll, cry, resettle), but over the course of a nap or the night she works her way out of it, rolls during a sleep transition, and wakes up crying. If it happens during a nap, I have no chance of getting her back to sleep. At night she'll resettle ok, but will wake up pretty grumpy in the morning, which is unusual for her. This morning she woke at 5am and as soon as I went in and flipped her back onto her back, she went straight back to sleep, so I don't think it's a case of her wanting to be on her tummy. I suspect she'd like to sleep on her side, but she doesn't seem to have the control to stay that way.

I know this is a phase that will pass and eventually she'll sort herself out. Just wondering how long this is likely to take, and also whether there is something I can try to do with her during the day to help her along the way. We have been trying to teach her to roll from tummy to back, and she's actually been able to do it for ages, she just seems to have forgotten about it. Any ideas?

 

[hanni]

We went through this once Dominic started rolling and it literally only lasted a few weeks before he became strong enough to roll back while he was asleep too. Hope it passes soon for you!

 

[Hieveryone]

Sleeping bags may help as mine finds it more tricky to roll over in his?

 

[MindUtopia]

I think it's one of those things that you just need to wait out and it will get better when she's not so keen to practice it. Once they tend to master the new skill, they tend to stop trying to practice it as they're going to sleep. For us, it lasted a few weeks, and then she was back to normal again, no rolling as she was going to bed. We didn't change anything. Just supported each other a little bit better through it so no one lost their mind! And then it was done and bedtimes were much easier again.

 

[RaquelDee]

Thanks to everyone for the advice. She is already in a sleeping bag, she's just a champion roller. I did hope it would help, but she proved me wrong very quickly.

Having said that, she seems to have found enough control to get onto her side and stay there, so her sleep has pretty much gone back to normal. She still doesn't roll tummy to back in the day, but she seems to keep her arms down when she rolls at night rather than flinging them out, which helps her stabilise herself on the side. I've only had to flip her over in the middle of the night once since my original post. So like a few people have suggested, it took a couple of weeks but now has settled down again.

I did notice that yesterday when we had a very busy day and she spent a fair bit of time in the pram or the car, we had lots of rolling and multiple resettles at bed-time. Obviously she needs as much opportunity as possible to roll around in the day to get it all out of her system before bed, which is definitely something I'll remember next time we are planning a big day away from home.