Our 16 month old has always been an early riser. Could never really get him past 5:30-5:45am no matter what we did so we accepted it.
However for the past few months he has been crying awake pretty much bang on 4am (sometimes needs resettling by putting a dummy in or sometimes resettles himself) only to wakeup at 5am crying again but this time for the day. We try and leave him in his cot until 5:45-6am unless he’s hysterical so not to reinforce the early wake.
He now sleeps through until 4am absolutely fine unless ill and I could maybe even accept the 5am wakeup if it didn’t have the 4am wakeup in between. Never mind he is clearly still tired and only clocking 9-9:30 hours of night sleep.
We have so many blackout blinds, it’s not daylight waking him. We have a sound machine, tried a nightlight. He has loads of dummies and even a straw cup of water in case he’s thirsty. He has a supper and a bedtime drink of milk so don’t think it can be hunger and bedtime is 7-7:30pm. We’ve tried earlier and later bedtimes and NOTHING is breaking this 4am habit!
me and my partner work full time and he has always been an extremely demanding baby from the moment he was born so the sleep deprivation is really starting to get to me. Most nights I go to bed at 8pm and it’s still not enough.
any advice would be extremely appreciated!