3.5 yo waking up and playing at night

[E1066]

I really need some advise here as I’m at my wits end! My 3.5yo wakes up every night between around 2-4:30am and plays. She chats in her bed, sings, has tea parties with her toys etc etc and then I have to wake her up at 7:30am and she’s exhausted. I just don’t know what to do, we have a really established bedtimes routine and up until 6 months or so ago, she slept through the night soundly.
what can I do as I’m really worried it’s going to impact her during the day?
I’ve tried ignoring jt
ive tried going in and telling her to sleep
I’ve tried bribery
there was one night I got angry but that didn’t help obviously I was just exhausted

As I said, her bedtime routine is structured, we go up at 7:30pm do teeth etc, warm milk, bedtime story, lights out at 7:50pm.

has anyone been through this? Any tips at all would be welcome

I should add that I’ve also checked if she’s too hot/cold
too much light from hallway light waking her up?
not enough light?

So sleeping in two blocks is actually a really normal human sleep pattern – at various times through history, it's been the norm, even for adults. As long as she gets enough sleep overall, it won't be bad for her development or anything like that. That doesn't make it any more convenient, however.

If you can, I'd roll with it for now (it's really, really hard to make someone sleep if they're not feeling tired), whilst also making it a bit boring if you can, so there's no particular incentive to be awake playing then. Can you bring bedtime forward so that she's still getting enough sleep? Then when she does wake up, keep lights low, absolute minimum engagement from you, no exciting toys in her room. You could really strip back how many toys she has in there, or what she's allowed to get out and play with at night, depending on how hard you want to push 'being awake at night is boring'.