5 month old suddenly waking in the night…

[autumn202123]

Long story short, my 5 month used to be a pretty decent sleeper, maybe would wake 2-3 times for his dummy back and would go straight back to sleep.

since turning 5 months last week he is now waking at random times 1am or 4am or 2am (it’s different every night) and is wide awake and babbling away, playing with his hands, trying to turn etc.. this goes on for 45 mins before he finally falls back asleep and he will sometimes do this twice in the night, it’s exhausting.

I guess I am coming on here to ask if anyone experienced this? And is this a phase I need to get through?

I am pretty careful with his wake windows and sleep during the day time and have recently extended wake windows since his turned 5 months.

He has recently learnt to roll by himself so part of me thought is this new behaviour linked to that?

anyone experience this and if so, when did it finally stop?😪

What are his wake windows now?

Sleep isn’t linear, especially in the first year. It doesn’t just get good and stay good, it goes through good patches and bad patches and it is dependant on a LOT of factors, including learning new skills.

However if this has been happening since you deliberately extended his wake windows I would probably attribute it to that.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it 😅

5 months is hell ish for sleep. And yes, it’s connected to rolling and all the brain development happening right now. I don’t think there is much you can do about it other than just keep going.

I increased his wake windows only by 15-20 minutes after a week battle of resisting his 3 daily naps, I thought maybe he needed more awake time, tbh it hasn’t made loads of difference he still fights his naps a bit, albeit not as bad as before.

his current wake window is 2/2.25/2.75/2.5 but the last one is a struggle to keep him awake and he is often quite grumpy after 2 hours so perhaps I’m keeping him up when he just wants to sleep thus making him overtired?

my 1st baby never really went through regressions, or if he did, it was for a few days then back to business as usual. Guess I was lucky.

yeah, I’m leaning towards that, he has definitely been very active with rolling, screeching and grabbing everything in sight plus his teething. Hopefully this phase doesn’t last too long!

2.75 is far too long considering you’ve only just increased them so I’d make some adjustments with that x