5am Starts

[Lottie231]

Any tips for a baby who wakes up consistently at 5am every morning (sometimes even earlier… 4.40am etc!) One very tired mummy here.

My baby boy is 10 months old. I try to get him back down when he wakes up but once he is awake, there is no settling him to be honest!

He goes to bed at 7pm, and I don’t feel we could stretch it any later than that because he is so tired by then.

He has 2 naps a day, one morning about 10am and one afternoon after lunch time.

Following!! Same boat at the moment. Put bub down at 8.30 but it’ll be playtime at 5/5.30!

My 3 year old is still getting up at 5! To be fair it's mostly because he's got a cough which is waking him up early. But it's a killer

Could you try pushing back bedtime very gradually, maybe just by 15 minutes initially then after a few nights another 15 minutes etc. you could trial a later bedtime (like 8pm) for a week or two and see if it makes a difference.

Another 3 year old on 5am wake ups like @Dinoland 🙋🏻‍♀️ Anywhere between 4.45-5.15 usually 😴

Goes to bed at 7pm shattered. The nights I’ve attempted to push bedtime a bit later he’s been up multiple times through the night and still wakes at the same time, just much more grumpy after all the night wakes!
I just try and embrace it - I’ve just put my second load of laundry in the machine, first is hanging up to dry, and the dinner is in the slow cooker 🙃 My house currently has a very elaborate train track running through it which has been DSs handiwork this morning.
We leave the house at 7.20am for a 40 min walk/balance bike to nursery then I walk a further 20 mins to work for an 8.30 start so the early mornings aren’t necessarily a bad thing for us (although they are exhausting!)

So he’s getting nearly 10 hours sleep from 7 pm, which is really good, you’ve either got to try later naps and then maybe a later bedtime. My second son went to bed at 8 pm like clockwork, I used to go to bed at 9 pm when my first child went to bed, it was the only way I could get enough sleep. My DH went to bed at 10 so me going to bed at 9 wasn’t a problem.

Try pushing his first nap back a bit - maybe he’s ready to drop to one longer nap a day?

I had this for a while with mine but after a few months and dropping to one nap a day he’s still an early riser but a more manageable 6:30ish start.

Unfortunately, sometimes that's just what babies and small children are like! Mine was exactly the same. We had a few tired years of very early starts and now they're 6 and usually wake between 6.30am - 7am so it will get better at some point! Hang in there.

I would push his first nap back a bit as it sounds like hes using it to catch up on lost nighttime sleep. Maybe cap it at 30/45 mins so he still gets his lunchtime nap and has enough wake time before bedtime

I don't think there's much you can do tbh! It's only when mine got abit older (3 and above) that I would tell them not to wake me before a certain time, and if they wake up they can play in their room or go and turn the TV on

I knew the baby would be somewhere between 9 and 14 months old. I think this is one of those annoying phases you just have to get through. It seems to happen when 2 naps is a little too much but 1 nap won’t be enough and they aren’t quite physically able to burn enough energy.

We had some success with making the morning nap really snappy - like 20 to 30 mins max, then a longer PM nap.

To be honest though, 4-5am starts were common until DS1 was charging around and dropped to 1 nap, which happened at about the same time.

No personal experience of that age but advice I’ve seen online for early morning wakes is generally to lower the amount of day time sleep. Add up their total sleep over 24 hours, decide how many hours you want them to have overnight, say 11 so they slept 7pm-6am and then cap day time naps so that they have 11 hours left to have at night.

Agree with pp that this can be a phase. Ours only started sleeping longer when dropped to one nap and could be really active during the day.

My oldest was up at 4.30-5.30 daily (usually 3.30 before 18 months, which obviously isn't even morning, but he couldn't be convinced...) until starting reception last year. He was in full time nursery before so it makes no sense to me that now he's doing shorter school days, he's coming home absolutely exhausted and waking around 6am instead. His younger sister prefers to sleep until about 7... Not loads you can do at 10 months if that's how they're wired. I've tried everything 😅