Neighbors baby wakes me up

[kingat]

Hi, it is early Saturday morning and I am up again because the neighbors baby woke me up again. He is around 1.5 and still wakes up at least two times each night and gets up at 6. We are in terraced house and my bedroom is next to his nursery. He cries for them really loud, more like screams which is followed by them running to him and then some noisy shuffling. In themorning they seem to let him play in his cot for about 30mins and I can hear that, so cant go to back to sleep. He then runs around the bedrooms babling and they are talking loud and it is just very noisy. So my question is what can I do? AIBU to complain to someone? Who?

Sympathy but thats how it is. Could you move your bedroom downstairs and convert your current bedroom to a sitting room? No, not ideal, but just as a temporary measure. Cheaper than soundproofing. Life with a toddler can be miserable for parents in terms of exhaustion, lack of sleep, constant demands, need for vigilance etc, although there is much joy to be had for some. Pressure from neighbours would only make that worse. Sometimes you just have to change your own situation to suit the conditions.

You may find that after a year or two the situation improves. If you can't/are unwilling to change anything in your house, you might just need to move.

As an aside, where has the OP gone?

I know people have lives, but it's a bit frustrating when someone posts a thread and then doesn't stay for at least 10 minutes to see what people are saying, and answer the responses.

Probably back to sleep

Helen blimey it's only been an hour since OP posted?

Tell them to co-sleep.

Helen your expectations from a chat forum are waaaaay too high.

Could be worse.
In our first house (a terrace) we could hear our next door neighbour shouting at and hitting his wife fairly frequently. (Got police involved, she wouldn't press charges)

I'd have given my right arm for a crying baby!

The only thing I can advise is to move somewhere with neighbours who have children the same ages as yours, who are equally noisy to yours, and parents who similarly sometimes lose it and scream like banshees. Then you actually find the noise affirmative rather than disturbing. This approach has worked very well for me - I wouldn't swap my neighbours for ten thousand pounds

What do you expect them to do? No parent wants their child to be waking that often at night.

Your options - move to a detached house. Or be grateful it's just a kid waking in the night, which they will grow out of, and not a flatshare who like to party.

If you don’t have the option of swapping to another bedroom in your house you could try vacuuming upstairs around midnight every night. When your neighbours with the baby complain say “ I’m so sorry, I didn’t think noise bothered you, what with little Johnny waking up crying at 2.30 4.15 and 6 am on Thursday, “

Then you and your poor neighbours will have an uncomfortable relationship for the rest of the time you live next to each other.

Seriously, their baby is 1.5 so he may be cutting some back teeth and hopefully will sleep through again very soon. Change bedrooms or buy earplugs until he is a bit older. Another option might be for you to play some gentle White noise in the background , YouTube do have some 8 hour long videos of nighttime white noise. It may be enough to hide the noise of the baby.

I also don't get what you expect them to do? Yes, they probably could go to the baby sooner, but I suspect in reality they can't win. After all, you complain when they run to him and about their noisy shuffling. So you're essentially complaining about a baby that doesn't sleep through the night, which, believe me, the parents are just coping with as best they can by the sounds of it.

We had this with DD2, and if we could have found a solution we would have done.

It's very frustrating and annoying for you, I get that. But it's not something within their control either.

Unless he's banging things on your wall at night (in which case I'd have a word) I think you just have to put up with it. Try earplugs or sleeping in another room.

My baby woke crying every hour in the night got around 5 months (teething and colic). Sometimes she cried for hours even though I was cuddling her. Now she's a toddler and still wakes once or twice most nights. She's up around 5am every day and can be quite screechy!
It hadn't occurred to me to worry about the neighbours. Babies and toddlers are noisy but they grow out of it.

There's nothing you can do. Except talk to them which I doubt will go down well. My neighbours the same so I do sympathise. Babies 10months and wakes crying at about 12, sometimes through the night then on and off from four am to six am where her brother gets woken by her and they then seem to thunder around squealing. It's annoying cause my kids are sound asleep then get disturbed and spend the day grumpy and tired. My only option is to put my kids to bed at 6am like they do but that doesn't fit with our life.

They will sleep soon. It won't be forever.

Part and parcel of terraced house living I'm afraid OP. One of my neighbours is complaining constantly because we shower too late, the hairdryer is too loud and this morning 9:45am is too early for the hoover

I'm going to guess you don't have kids, op. It's just something that you have to deal with. It sounds like the parents are already taking you into consideration and trying to stop the crying when it starts, not entirely sure who you can complain to either?

I suggest you move to a detached house!
Seriously OP - what do you expect them to do about it?

What would you hope to achieve by complaining to someone? That they get a stern talking to by the police? The baby gets arrested for being noisy? They all get evicted? Environmental health turns up and orders them to turn their baby's volume down until such a time as you deem acceptable?
Get some earplugs. Hopefully it won't last for much longer and the child starts to sleep through.

You could try throwing the odd passive aggressive comment into your next conversation like 'how do you manage to sleep through all the screaming'.

Or soundproofing. It works. Or the cheaper way is good earplugs. Or better still both. And the last resort is move!

@Mammyloveswine 100% agree with you

The OP hasn't come back, I'm not exactly surprised. I suspect she was only having a vent though, she's entitled to feel fed up of course. (I used to feel that way when DD2 was waking us up at 5am every morning for over a year, and I didn't have the option of putting ear plugs in my ears but heigh ho.)

I live in a flat and am in exactly the same position as you OP. It is ruining my life now, two years of it and now she is having another. To boot they do controlled crying and it is as loud as if there is a baby in my room that I can't get to IYSWIM.

Utterly sick of it. For those saying 'move' why the hell should we?
Have also been critically ill recently and do not need this at all.

The papa 'shouting 'OH paco, oh paco' loudly when playing with him just downright fucks me off tbh. At 7 on a Saturday morning. I also know they have two other rooms they could use as the flat is exactly like mine. But no, they choose to have him in the master, not my daughters room IYSWIM. I can't move rooms as my bed won't fit in the other and my daughter is in it anyway. The other is small and I used it a a nursery. It would cause NO noise if they did similar.

It's selfish of them to be frank. They are very rude to me too.

What you're describing is unreasonable and selfish, DanTDM, you have every right to be upset.

It doesn't sound as if the parents in the OP's situation are being selfish, though. They're going to the baby and doing their best to minimise the disturbance to their neighbours. Short of making the baby stay asleep, which sadly no one knows a way of achieving, it's not clear what they can do. (Apart from going into him when he first wakes up on Saturday morning, though being one and a half, chances are he would still be noisy.)

Sounds more like bad walls than particularly the baby. Not much you can do

My 21month old is still up twice a night and always up before 7am. I wish I could get her to sleep more! I'm sure the parents want the baby to sleep much more than you do!
Luckily we are in a 3/4s detached house (I know sounds weird it's just the way the houses sit) and DD is on an outside corner.
I don't doubt the childless couple next door have heard me shouting at my kids but they've never said anything and I put up with their visitor that insists on honking goodbye around 9pm about once a week.

my neighbour is currently blasting shout out to my ex over and over again, inbetween songs I can hear her ranting and moaning about said ex