Or is 4am a ridiculous time to get up?

[Cinocino]

Someone tell my baby!!

A month into 4 am wakes 😩
cooing, chatting and up for the day despite about 8 hours of broken sleep max.
5am I think I could do, wakes in the night I’m prepared for but night wakings and a 3:50 start!!! I’m dead.

Shes 7 months and getting 1 or 1.5 hrs of daytime sleep top s!

I feel a bond with the few regulars I see in the park at 7am on a Saturday to be fair!
Toddler never needs to queue for the swines so I guess that’s a plus.

Oh I can’t help them. Mine usually did about 10 hours and it was mostly a moveable feast. One was a bit more affected by the birds and also, I think, the cold as the temperature actually drops just before the dawn. If I got up for the loo etc in the small hours I would pop an extra blanket on ahead of that.

DS4 was like this, only slept for eight hours at night. I ended up moving his bed time until 10pm so he'd at least sleep until 6am.

The best bit of advice I got is if they are happy leave them to it in their cot.
so cooing etc doesn’t want a visit just crying.

our Dd is 2 and still wakes up god knows when.
she will merrily sing old McDonald’s, frere jacques etc and chunter away to herself about the birdies and the bin men until 6.30/7

I feel your pain. DS was either a 4.45/5 wake up or he’d be awake for ages in the night. A lot of his was teething, if I thought that was it I’d give ibuprofen and often that helped. Tbh we just prioritised sleep for us so early nights and napping in shifts at the weekend. Same as yours he was no problem to get down at night so I took that as a small win.

My son went through several phases of waking up at 4-5am. And that’s the time he started screaming so we got him up. He’d often have woken us half a hour earlier, lying there chatting to himself for ages before we got him up! He also wasn't a daytime napper at all unless I was pushing the pram for hours (although we were lucky that he went down easy at night).

It will pass! And then come back again. But then it will pass again! He's now nearly 3 and has been sleeping through the night to at least 7am for about a year.

My 8 month old woke for the day at 4am this morning. I just kept trying to feed her back to sleep (I don't think I could have physically got up, i was so knackered) and she finally feel back to sleep at 5am :/

I've always tired mime out then watched for the first sign of tiredness, eye rub, yawn etc then straight to pushchair or cot for a nap. Sometimes they take 20mins to go to sleep, other times its very quick, but i follow the same logic as bed time, i go in and resettle as often as needed for them to learn when they go in their cot its nap time

Fingers crossed that when she gets more mobile she'll do a better job of wearing herself out during the day and so sleep for longer.

I’m gonna say it. Stick a lime in their room.

This def doesn't work for mine!

The thing is, this little gremlin turns the cooing and chatting into a piercing scream like she’s shouting “oi loser! Can’t you hear me? It’s wakey up time!!!” and then has the nerve to rub her eyes and yawn like 50 mins later!

The winter is ages away! Mine only ever does a big stretch at the beginning of the night (sometimes after a false start). The longest he's done is 6 hours and he's only done that twice

Sorry I meant when op’s dc was about 1 and walking etc. Which is when winter should be about here.

There really should be a government scheme to match old people like me (60’s) who can’t sleep past 4 am with mum’s whose babies wake at 4.
I would gladly play with a baby rather than trying to make myself sleep until 6.

Early wakes occur a lot, as many have said. But to me, 3.50am is a night wake, not an early wake! I think at 7 months going from 1.30pm-bedtime is an extremely long wake window for her age and it is likely she is very overtired. Both my children woke early and went down at bedtime easily so a similar situation. I fought tooth and nail to get a good nap routine going - at 7 months I religiously did 3h wake/nap/3h wake/nap/3h wake/bed. So a two nap day. I also put them down 15 mins prior to wake window ending so at 2hrs 45m wake. E.g. up at 6, into cot at 8.45, sleep as long as they can. Then 3h awake from when they wake up. And so on. If they have a ridiculously short nap, then keep following routine and enjoy early bedtime. Don't fear it! It might seem counter intuitive but it did work in the end...after a fortnight of this, both seemed to get the memo! There is a nearly 5 year age gap between my two so we did have school runs etc to factor in but we managed to make it work. (I shifted morning wake up time so that baby was awake for school runs and we could be home for naps).

Sleep deprivation nearly killed me and this is what worked for me in the end. I understand the level of consistency required is not for everyone but maybe worth a go for a few weeks over the summer when things are less mad. Good luck!

That’s genius!

It’s also an interesting potential contribution to discussion around whether the custom of different cultures and times of living as extended family is not healthier and more efficient than our current isolated nuclear family set ups.

I agree @Calliopespa .

In the last 50 years families have moved location much more than previously.
I haven’t lived near close family for 40 years.

So do you then put her back down when she rubs her eyes?! Best time for first nap is within 2hrs of wake up as their body is still full of good sleep hormones, so they can have a good quality sleep

Do you want to pick her up or shall I drop her off?? I’ll send her with a flask of tea for you.

That sounds like a great amount of sleep mine only slept 2 hours in 24 until he was 5 then it increased to 4 hrs, the joys of ADHD.

I don’t because under an hour after she’s woken seems like a ridiculous time for a nap.

So much of the sleep advice says going down for a morning nap too early (under 2 hours) reinforces the early starts?!
Most of the advice people give is contradictory really.

Exactly! My dd didn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time at night, dropped daytime naps at 6 months old and didn’t sleep through the night until she was 26 months old. She was breastfed to 9 months, very healthy but simply hadn’t read the books obviously and didn’t need much sleep. It nearly killed me!
DS was the absolute opposite.
Both are very intelligent people, have great careers and I have grey hair as a result!

Two of mine did this too! Still do, one's 23 one's 11..........