how can i encourage my baby to stay up later at night??

[sharon137]

My DS is 10 months old, so is into everything, cruising along furniture, dancing, crawling and everything is very exciting or him - he is super energetic and a very happy baby generally, but he is knackered really early in the evening. For the past few weeks, he has been fast asleep most nights at 530pm. I am in Australia, so its still light then. he wakes at around 5am, and has two oone hour naps during the day.
I just feel like it's too early! But he always starts to get tired at around 430, so I give him his dinner and a bath at five-ish (he crawls to the bathroom door and sits there lokoing at me expectantly!!) then after his post-bath bottle, he is asleep. I feel mean rousing him, but I just feel I would like him to have a bit of a later bedtime - even 6pm!
My DH and I both work from home, so there isn't an issue about him not seeing DS or anything, so should I just leave it? Just hoping for some tips or reassurance that this is ok really!

Have you tried letting him have a nap at 4.30 when he gets tired? Does he stay asleep until the morning if you do that or will he wake after an hour or so? If he will take 4.30 to 5.30 ish as a nap you could probably keep him awake until 7/8ish.

Thanks.
I tried twice letting him snooze at 430, but he just woke up at 4am the next day!! 5am starts I can handle, but 4am is pushing it.. To be honest though, it's month or so since I did that so I might try it again.
Strawberry, we have tried keeping him up too, and nope, still wakes up early, is just grouchy all day because he;s been robbed of an hour or two...

A bit counter-intuitive but can you extend his daytime naps a bit

Also think about whether something might be waking him - the boiler clicking on, the milkman trundling past, any thing like that?

Also do a search for wake-to-sleep on here, I've never done it but IIRC it can be quite successful

Tbh, I think you're incredibly lucky to have a 10mth old who sleeps 11-12 hours at night! Of course, it would be lovely to also get up at a reasonable hour, but that's pushing it a bit. The last thing you want is to interfere with his sleep patterns to the point that he begins night-waking.

My two (3yo and 17mth) generally wake up somewhere between 5am and 6am, and I think that's pretty normal. They go to bed about 6pm. DH and I have simply adjusted our hours to fit in - we go to bed about 9pm and get up with them. It works for us. If we put ours to bed later, they still wake up at that time.

If you both work at home (I do too) then you can adjust to fit. It makes life easier in the end. And you can feel unbelievably virtuous about having half the day's work done by 11am :)

Can you push his bathtime to later eg 6.30pm so he ends up sleeping at 7pm?