Where do I return a baby?

…jokes aside, my husband and I are slowly but surely losing our minds over our newborn. Since our midwife and doctor haven’t been much help, I thought maybe someone here might have some advice, encouragement or at least solidarity to offer.

We had the chillest, most beautiful first week with our baby. She fed well, slept well, and was overall a dream. But around one week old things started going downhill. She began refusing her day naps and it’s gotten progressively worse. Now she’s four weeks old and daytime naps at home feel nearly impossible.

Our routine goes something like this: we wake up, head to the kitchen-living room, feed her, burp her, change her and interact a bit (contrast cards, talking, etc.) until she shows tired cues. Then we try to get her to sleep with a pacifier and gentle rocking but she just fusses, stiffens up, flails her arms around and spits out the pacifier. She might drift off for a few moments only to jolt awake again.

Eventually we give up and take her outside in the pram or for a car ride or put her in the carrier and she immediately falls asleep. But the moment we stop moving she wakes right up.

She’s also quite fussy after feeding, spits up often, has frequent hiccups and seems to have gas pains. On top of that she has pretty severe baby acne. We’ve seen doctors, but they just keep telling us it’s normal newborn behavior and the acne is normal.

I’ve tried cutting dairy from my diet, but nothing changed. Tried Gaviscon for reflux on our midwife’s advice but it made things worse. Tried gas drops and they gave her explosive diarrhea. Nothing seems to help and we’re honestly at our wits’ end.

She is only getting around 3-5 hours sleep from wake up until she settles for the night. Then during the night she is a different baby, sleeping 2,5-5 hour stretches and settling easily for sleep with easy transfer to the bassinet. So she makes up for it during the nights.

This morning I decided to try to have her take the day nap the same way the nights go, that is dark room, white noise and love to dream sleep suit and she fell asleep relatively easily but didn’t sleep for long. I’ve also heard it’s not good for babies to not differentiate between day naps and nighttime sleep.

Has anyone been through something similar? What helped? Does it ever get easier?