5.30 wake ups - help!

[PiperG]

I know there are soo many posts about this kind of thing, but thought I'd add my contribution! Our 20 month old daughter has been waking pretty regularly at 5.30 for the last few months. This is really starting to hurt now that we have a newborn too - I am up all night with DS while my partner sleeps on the sofa bed so he can get up with DD at the crack of dawn ... (not that it is even dawn yet then). She goes to bed easily at 7.15/7.30 every night - I don't know whether to try to get her to bed a bit later? Though she's so tired by 7 that I am reluctant to do that. Sometimes when she wakes even earlier (5ish) we give her some milk and then she'll sleep for a couple more hours if we're lucky, but I know this is not a good habit to get into. I am also wondering whether to try the wake to sleep technique but am terrified of doing this in case it means we start waking her up at 4.30 and then she doesn't go back to sleep ... does anyone know of anything else I can try? This 'bunny clock' I've read about elsewhere sounds great but I think she's probably a bit too young for this type of thing. If only she would just sleep till after 6 I think we could cope with that!

[robin3]

We've gone from DS2 sleeping until 6.30 - 7.00 to a 5.00 wake up and it's horrible. Bunny clock wouldn't work for him as he's 18 months and wouldn't get it. I think we probably went through similar with DS1 but he was the same age in the summer so we probably put it down to daylight. Like you I doubt that digging him out of his bed at 4 would help us.

He also has a 1.5-2 hour nap in the middle of the day and needs to go to bed at 6.30ish.