Why won't my baby sleep? Is she just not tired?

Is it possible she's simply not sleepy?

That was our question, on a day she'd barely slept since nine in the morning. She was feeding well and completely awake, and it seemed reasonable to conclude she just didn't need it.

She did need sleep. We had simply missed the easy settling window, and by then her whole body was on high alert.

Overtired looks like wide awake

This is the strange bit and it catches everyone. Past a certain point, a tired baby doesn't get sleepier — she gets wired. Alert, jerky, hard to settle, and furious about all of it.

So the evidence you're reading as "not tired" is often the evidence that she's badly overtired.

The fix isn't more awake time. It's going earlier next time, at the first yawn or glazed stare rather than at the point where she's arching and crying.

What happens if she doesn't sleep

We asked this directly, and the answer was less frightening than the question felt.

A baby who has a bad day catches up. Sleep debt gets repaid, usually that night or the following day. One bad sleep day does not mean you have harmed her.

What it does mean is that the following few hours will be harder, and that an earlier bedtime is the correct response rather than a later one.

An hour in a dark room with white noise. Picking her up made her cry harder. A breastfeed lasted two minutes and changed nothing.

At that point we asked whether we should just let her cry until she passed out. The honest answer for a baby that young is no — leaving a newborn to cry it out isn't appropriate, and it doesn't work anyway. We obviously didn’t want to do this but we were at nerves end, and had no idea what else to do.

What we should have done, and eventually did, was swap over. One person at the end of their patience with an unable to stop crying baby is a much worse combination than a fresh person with the same baby. Handing over isn't giving up.

Go through a list, have it printed if necessary. You are tired, you probably have checked the diapers 16 times that day, and then the moment you haven’t is the time you should have. It always happens. We had a mental list, check when she last ate, her diaper, when she last woke up and when she last played. Once we got that we had a clear idea of what to do next.

Papa always did the exact same thing. The NICU nurses and doctors taught him so many ways to carry the baby, and yet, he was always comfortable holding Ari only one way. It became the way to put Ari to sleep. Feed her always the same way, rock her always the same way, put her to sleep always the same way. Sometimes, rather than adapting and learning all possible ways, if there is one you are really comfortable with mastering that is much better than knowing 5 different ways to hold her. Mama learnt all the others. As a team it worked.

And there's a guide next to this one about what we found when we finally checked the nappy.