5.5 month old schedule help

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Hi everyone,

I have posted before about my little girls naps but was just wondering if someone could help take a look at our overall schedule and see if I could do anything to improve it? We are currently struggling with 5:30am wake ups and am not sure where the problem is. Solo Naps still are short as well, she will be 6 months on the 26th of the month.

In an attempt to solve the 5:30am wake ups I have been trying a stricter 7pm bedtime but that hasn’t helped, I will also add that she has just cut her first tooth which wasn’t fun haha!

Our schedule went something like this:

5:30am wake up - either try to leave her if happy or distract / resettle until 6am earliest. I tried feeding here but that didn’t help resettle her and she wakes up ready to go not tired(unlike her mum!)

6:30-7am bottle (formula fed 7oz)

8am - Nap 1, trying to keep her up to at least 8am can be tricky depending on when she woke up. I settle her and she sleeps in her cot, wakes up at 35-45mins.

10am - bottle (7-8oz)

11:15am (ish) - Nap 2, starts off in her cot for the 40mins I then hold her for another hour or so to make sure she gets a long nap in. She isn’t great at being resettled in the cot and only sleeps an extra 10mins if I try that.

1pm (ish) - bottle 7oz

3:30pm - Nap 3, held from the start. 30-45mins

4:15pm - bottle 7oz

6:15pm - bedtime routine

7pm - bottle 8oz and bed.

No overnight feeds. She sometimes wakes to be resettled but generally resettles herself at night.

Im tempted to try a bedtime closer to 8pm to see if that pushes wake time over the 6am mark as I don’t think she’s a baby that will do 12hours overnight!! More like 10.5-11.

Alongside the later bedtime I’m also thinking of going into her at 5:30am and just holding her so she hopefully sleeps until 6:30am then officially start the day and have nap 1 at 9am.

Im hoping the naps start to sort themselves out in length on their own 🤞but I would obviously love to not have to contact nap everyday, but will if I have to!

Does anyone have any ideas if these things will work / have worked for you? When she’s up at 5:30am it makes the day hard as she wants a nap super early 😫.

Thanks if you’ve got this far!! Any advice welcome 🤗

Sorry I skim read most of that because obviously your biggest issue is the early starts. How dark is her room at that time of day? We currently have an issue with early starts and suspect it's because his bedroom is so light.

A hack I've heard of is "rouse to sleep". You go in an hour before the regular wakeup (or 15 min, in the case of naps) and disturb her, but don't wake up fully. It's supposed to reset the internal clock and the sleep cycle starts again, so they sleep longer. My boy is a very deep sleeper so I met this with resounding failure, but apparently it's a tried and tested method that multiple professionals have advised me to try

She is having 10.5 hours' sleep a night so that is presumably what her body clock needs. So by putting her to bed so early, she is waking early too. The answer is staring you in the face, really.

If you want her to wake up later, then put her to bed later. Shift her entire routine. Do it in 5 or 10 minute stages, and in a couple of weeks it should have sorted itself out. Also, make sure she has proper blackout blinds in her bedroom.

We have a black out blind and white noise machine in her room!

Yeah I have heard about the wake to sleep thing but I don’t know, she’s such a light sleeper and once she’s up she’s up I have always been too scared to try 😂

I've never understood why people put their babies to bed really early in the evening, and then wonder why they wake up at the crack of dawn.

Don't do the wake to sleep thing. Just put her to bed later, then she'll wake up later. My dd only ever needed about 10 hours sleep at night, so if we'd put her to bed at 7pm she'd have been waking at 5am. We preferred to lose time in the evenings and get a reasonable lie-in, so we put her to bed around 8.30-8.45.

Everything you read says that an early bedtime will fix an early rise as they are overtired or something 🙄 I don’t know it’s a complete minefield as a FTM! Hopefully a later bedtime will solve it 🤞 it’s just getting there now!!

Firstly, you’re doing great! She’s sounding pretty settled and normal for her age.

Also mine is the same at 18m old he just always needs 10.5hrs. In our experience putting him down later hasn’t made a difference he’s still up at 6am but more grumpy! what has made a huge difference is my husband and I designating the night before who’s turn it is to get up with him in the morning and us adjusting our natural bedtimes to work with this. In the grand context it’s not for long but in the daily context it feels forever; this method has helped us greatly and we’ve become far less resentful towards the one who didn’t get up (and therefore did sleep 😴)

She's still quite little at 5.5 months. We were still at 4 naps at her age. Her wake windows do seem quite big and overtiredness does supposedly cause early morning waking. Might be worth changing her nap schedule a bit to reduce wake windows and accept more frequent shorts naps for now. It's not unusual for them to take a few more months to move towards longer daytime naps which link sleep cycles. I would also start to work on her sleeping somewhere other than on you for naps - bouncer, buggy or anything that moves to start with, then progress to cot. She is also quite young to have dropped all night feeds (although it's not unheard of the norm would more usually be 6/7 months onwards if not later). Could be worth trying a late evening feed before you go to bed to see if that helps.

I personally wouldn't make bedtime later and I wouldn't start going in and holding her. She's doing really well as is and I don't think either of those things will help. Much of what she's doing is perfectly normal in terms of sleep development.

Thanks @Annatinks I honestly feel like such a crap mum most of the time with her naps so that’s nice to hear 😊 yeah I’m well prepared for the fact that she might just be a 5:30am baby😫 I guess we will know in a few days once I’ve given the schedule a change.

@MGee123 I have tried to go based on when she starts to get sleepy and it’s usually around 2-2.5hours awake so that’s how we have ended up with those wake windows. I used to extend her first nap as well but stopped doing that a few weeks ago as it just isn’t sustainable for me. Her naps have always been tricky, she has never slept longer than 20mins in the pram even with rocking or continuous walking etc and never in a swing or bouncer even when she was a newborn! She will sleep in the car but it has to be moving or she will wake.
She used to sleep in a sling on me but to be honest she’s so nosy that doesn’t work unless she’s very tired now!
The fact she sleeps 40mins on her own in the cot I thought would never happen a month or so ago, I don’t want to create bad habits with the contact naps but we are very limited unfortunately. She would be super cranky on short naps all day 😫
We tried dreamfeeds when she was younger but they didn’t really make much of a difference she still woke the same amount in the night so we just let her decide and she stopped waking for feeds around 4month mark, doing the usual dropping down to 1 feed and then that feed getting later into the morning etc.

I don’t know, so much to think about and decide on what to do 🙈

Lyndsey Hookway on instagram… she will have all of your answers. I reckon 5.30 is a phase and you’ll get slightly later wake ups sooner than you know. I certainly wouldn’t be pushing bedtime any later; in my experience that just makes bedtime harder because you’ve missed your window and creates a very tired little human the next day when they still wake at the same time. Tricky because 5.5 months is very young to be sleeping through the night IMO. Dream feed when you go to bed?

Sorry just seen your latest post about dream feeds… it was all I could really think of!

@ReeseWitherfork I really hope it is just a phase! She is having 37oz of formula in the day which I know it over the “recommended” amount so would I need to reduce the other feeds if I was attempting a dream feed again?