Sleeping through... but now waking early?!

[anonnancy]

Hello!

So last night my little boy slept through the night for probably the third time ever (he is 8 months). He goes to bed at 7/7:30pm depending on when his last nap finished. He usually wakes in the night around 2:30-3:30 for a feed. I have been attempting night weaning for this feed as I think he is doing it out of habit more than hunger. He has been having 3oz for the last few nights and will self settle back to sleep within 5-10 minutes and will then sleep until 6:30/7.

Last night he slept 7pm-5:30 and then woke up for the day. I managed to settle him back down from 6-6:30 and he’s just had his first nap which was 08:45-10:15.

Should I be cutting this nap short to try and prevent his early waking in the morning? He can only really stay awake 2.5 hours at the absolute max between naps so if I wake him say after 45 minutes (so today would have been 09:30, I don’t think he would even make it to lunchtime before needed his second nap?

Just totally confused as to what I should be doing to help him get to that magical 7-7!

Just to add his total napping adds up to around 3-3.5 hours a day

Thank you all! X

[TheBestSpoon]

If he's doing 10.5 hours overnight, and 3-3.5 hours in the day, that's overall a good amount in 24 hours and you're unlikely to get the night sleep up to 12 hours while keeping that much naptime in the day - that would be over 15 hours asleep in every 24. Some babies do that, but not many. So, if you think your little one (or you!) would benefit from a bit more sleep overnight, slightly reducing day sleep is probably a good way to go about it. If you think he really needs that morning nap, perhaps try capping the last nap of the day to a short catnap to power through to bed? How many naps does he have at the moment?

This may not be what you want to hear, but I was in the same situation with my DS, and we never got him sleeping longer. We ended up gradually shifting his bedtime to 8 so he slept to 6:30/7am. He simply didn't seem to need or want more sleep overnight, and I think once he dropped the feed what had been a 11/11.5 hour sleep including time to feed and resettle just dropped naturally to 10.5 hours. But he'd always needed less sleep than the average since birth. He also liked a longer morning nap and waking him up from that just seemed to make him grumpy. So we decided to go with his patterns and accept it meant a bit less evening time for us - worked out quite well when he went to nursery at a year old as it meant we had more time with him in the evenings. Good luck!

[saiditbetterthanme]

My ds was like this and at 9 months I went back to work. For 2 days he was at nursery so on the 3rd day he'd be really quite tired and sleep a little longer till 6.
I remember lots of 4 30/ 5am starts for about 3 months but it did pass. I valued the evening time with my DH and as I'm an early bird, coped with the earlys with DH stepping in when I needed him to!
Keep going. It's a tough stage and I sympathise! If it's any consolation ds is now 2 and a half. He has been sleeping through reliably 7pm to 7am since 14months.

[anonnancy]

@TheBestSpoon thanks - I did think that he is having too much sleep (can’t believe there is such a thing!) I might try capping the first nap as he does tend to wake after 30/40 mins and I go in to resettle him. Then hopefully he has a decent lunchtime nap and I can get a little 15/20, min catnap in the pram to see us through.

I’d be happy for a later bedtime but DH is not keen on that idea as I always go to bed relatively early as I’m so knackered from keeping DS alive and happy in the day 😂!

@saiditbetterthanme thank you for the sympathy. I don’t HATE the early starts, it’ll just take getting used to... just didn’t know if I was doing something wrong to cause the early waking! And when I’m back at work in December I’ll be needing him to be up around 6 at the latest to get us both fed and dressed for the day at work & nursery!

I just get very jealous of all my friends who have babies younger than DS who are sleeping 7-7 with no wakes in the night 😆!

[TheBestSpoon]

Sounds like a good plan! If you're going to have to get him up at 6 regularly in a few months anyway, it probably isn't worth investing too much effort in getting him to sleep later than that now, and definitely not worthwhile putting back bedtime. You'll probably find he sleeps a bit more at night as he drops naps over the next few months anyway - we gained about an hour as he moved from three naps to one.

Hopefully once he regularly sleeps through you'll find that you're less exhausted and don't need to go to bed so early too. It took months for me to feel completely normal again even after he started mostly sleeping through, and I thought I'd never stay up as late as 11pm again, but occasionally I do now... Wild times! Usually we only have from about 8:30-10 before heading to bed ourselves though. But I am not a morning person, and 5:30am starts did not agree with me. Plus *fingers crossed" we're lucky DS, now nearly 2, has become a good sleeper, if not a particularly long one, so we're rarely up with him in the night. I'll sacrifice a lot of evening relaxation for that!! (I've just cursed myself for tonight now...)