8 Month old Waking up for an hour and a half in the middle of the night

[DivaMummy15]

I wonder if anyone else has been through this - my 8 month old has always been a really good sleeper. Good day time napping and has generally slept through 5/6 nights of the week. The past week and a half she has been waking up at 2am, rocking on all 4s. She isn't crying but just loudly chatting. And is really wide awake. I do all the same things that i do when she goes to sleep normally - give her the dummy and taggie blanket she sleeps with but to no avail. So i then pick her up and try to calm her down. She finally falls asleep about an hour and a half later. She isn't crying - just awake. :( Anyone else been through this? She also has had 2 teeth come through in this same week and has been commando crawling for 3 weeks now, but is now learning to properly crawl. I just wish i could break this cycle....

[Timtammy]

Hi yes

My DS2 did this at 6 months and then again at 8 months. When I posted a few people replied saying their DC had done this at 8 months.
Unfortunately I didn't discover anything that would help, I just had to wait it out. It seems to last a few weeks each time.
For my DS I think it must be linked to development in some way ( he did crawl after the 6 month one and stood after the 8 month).
Hope it passes for you quickly.

[anotherBadAvatar]

Yep. Ours did this from 8-10m (sorry!) having slept thru from about 6 months old. Stopped on the dot when he was 10m, and he's sleeping well again. He's 11m now, and just waiting for next hiccup in sleep patterns to be thrust upon us!!

[anotherBadAvatar]

Totally agree with PP that is was developmental leap related (crawling in our case).

[Fraggled]

Yes it's a phase that some babies go through. I don't think there's anything g you can do other than ride it out. Both my 2 did it. It definitely sounds like she's thinking about crawling if she's rocking on all fours.

[jobrum]

My dd is doing this but waking at 5-6 ish. Now, I have no problem with getting up at 6 (not 5am!!!) if that's the time she's awake but she has a bit of a feed then dozes off, rubs her eyes etc and is clearly still very tired. If can take over an hour to get her back to sleep but then she might sleep until around 8.30 which then throws out the entire morning. Today, after an hour of trying to get her to go back to sleep I've given up and will get her ready for the day after my shower but from experience I know that this will make her grumpy and difficult to put down for a morning nap. I can't win! It doesn't help that I'd just got back to sleep when she woke me up after my dh woke me at 5am when he returned from the pub...

Dd is also trying very hard to crawl. It's at least comforting knowing that it is other babies too.

[DivaMummy15]

Thanks so much. What do you do when your Dc wakes ?

[moggle]

Our DD has done this a couple of times too. She is sometimes happy to just play in her cot in which case we'll shut our doors and try to get back to sleep. If not then we'll take it in turns to do a night, sit in her room with her while she's awake or just bob in and out as needed- sleeping in the spare room, and the other one puts earplugs in and sleeps undisturbed . As I've been on mat leave its been more me staying up but DH does do his bit too. It's just so infuriating- we found that if we were both up for hours every night we'd get so snappy with each other, arguing at 4am about how to deal with it which made everything so much worse.

One thing we never did was bring her downstairs. From about 3m once she was upstairs for bed that was it until 7am. No coming downstairs. Also we haven't brought her into our bed to sleep since she moved into her own room but I can see why you might want to. She's such a wriggler though no one would sleep! We'll sometimes put a low light on and read quietly to her but that's as stimulating as it gets. Def need a comfy chair for these phases!

[greatbigwho]

We've had the odd spell of this - she'll wake up for a bit in the middle of the night for 90mins-2 hours or so, then she'd just stop doing it. Sometimes she was happy to stay in bed, other nights we'd bring her downstairs. If that happened, lights were kept low, no TV, no noisy toys etc, just ready books or doing jigsaws quietly etc. We found bringing her down made zero difference to her waking up on subsequent nights, or to how long she stayed awake, so we just went with it!