aarrgghh 4am wake ups - please help!

[Liskey]

DD is a year old on Wed but was a month prem. She's recently started waking up between 4-4.30 for the day - groan. We try ignoring her for as long hoping that'll she'll go back to sleep (she did do that at 2.45 by herself) but it doesn't seem to be working.

She is now starting to stand by herself and nearly ready to walk so wondering if that could be affecting her sleep? But more importantly how can we get her to sleep longer? She used to sleep till 5.30 and that seemed bad but this is terrible at the moment. She has 2 naps a day between 8.30 - 10 and 2.00 - 3.30 - should i be looking at reducing these? We're also trying to reduce her milk to try and encourage her to eat more food as she's not really keen at the moment.

Any ideas please?
Cheers.

please???

I would try to drop the morning nap, or at least push it on a bit - 8:30 is pretty early. Both my dc have gone through long and painful stages of early rising, the only thing that ever helped for them was cutting down on daytime sleep, usually dropping a nap.

Having said that dd woke up at 3:50 (!!!!!) one day last week so who am I to advise! I do feel your pain though.

i know 8.30 is early but i feel so mean trying to keep her awake longer - yesterday at breakfast her eyes were closing and she was trying to go to sleep there. i kept her awake for another hour but couldn't any longer

Today she woke a bit later (well apart from the odd scream at 23.45, 2.45) and woke at 5.30 so lot better honest! Kept her up till 8.50 so trying to push it on a bit - yesterday she missed out on her long afternoon nap as we went out and she only had a nap in the car for about 45 mins - i do wonder if we need to cut back on daytime sleep. Problem is she seems so tired - she's not very big (16lb) and seems to tire herself out so much (she's very active).

Everything I've read suggests that 12mo is normally quite young to drop down to one nap and at this age should be having from 2-3 hrs per day, so I don't think she's having too much sleep if I'm honest.

We too have an early riser and I'm working with a sleep 'expert' at our HV team at the moment. I had been trying to keep DS awake for as long as possible in the morning and he was going 3.5-4hrs from waking before his morning nap and then again 4.5hrs before his afternoon.

She suggested putting DS down as early as he wants after his morning nap but making sure he was up no later than 10.30 (11 at a push) (he will 90% of the time sleep till I wake him). Then, in the afternoon, trying to put him down around 2.00 and waking him no later than 3.45pm if he hadn't already woken. The aim was to make sure he had enough restorative nap sleep but was still tired enough by bedtime to make sure that he went into a deeper sleep that would take him through later.

I didn't think this would work at all but have found that he actually goes down really nicely after 2hr45mins of being awake in the morning, and then again after 3hrs45mins in the afternon. So the actual times vary but the intervals remain the same. He tends to vary between 2.25 and 3.5 hrs napping overall a day.

We found a big difference within a week and he started going from 4.30-5.30, to 6.30-7.30. We occasionally get a blip and one early day, but we can cope with that if the rest are good!

Hope that's helpful. :)

Oh, I meant to say. I borrowed the 'No Cry NAP Solution' by Elizabeth Pantly and read the section about dropping down to one nap (as I also wondered if that was the trick) and she has a great checklist of things which if you 'tick' suggests they're probably not ready to drop the nap. Very helpful for reassuring you why you shouldn't necessarily drop one nap too soon.

Naps at different times do different things apparently as you have different types of sleep and babies need more of one than the other which if you drop too soon isn't great.

Reading with interest - ds is 15 mo and has 1 long nap after lunch from 12 noon for between 2 and 3 hours. He's exhausted by 7pm and will go straight off to sleep but is so inconsistent - sometimes he'll sleep until 5.30am, other times he'll wake at 3 or 4 am. If we offer milk when he wakes in the night, he'll always drink it so appears to be hungry, but tbh I'd like to get out of this feeding habit.

I would mostly agree with Tweetinat, however, my dc have always needed a lot less sleep than they are "supposed" to as babies. From at least 6 months (possibly earlier) neither of them would sleep more than 12hr out of 24hr, so if they had 3hr naps in total they would only sleep for 9hr at night.

Just a thought - is possible your dd is the same - although this is what the majority of babies do, doesn't mean yours will!

Cheers for the ideas - I'll try and get that book out the library and have a read too.

Today she decided to only have an a broken nap this morning and then wanted a really long nap this pm - i always wake her by 15.30 though otherwise she doesn't seem tired enough to go to bed at 18.30/18.45.

Why don't you put to bed a bit later?

Also agree re cutting down on day time sleep.
We do one 1.5 and one 45 min and that seems to help...

4am is indeed hideous Liskey. My DS has been a naff sleeper, but its only really early mornings that are tricky now (he's now 16 months). Initially I brought him into bed, BF and got another hour or so. This stopped working as he just wanted to play.

I agree with the others about either keeping the morning nap short and eventually working towards dropping it. Think I dropped DS's morning nap about 13-14 months.

Here's what I did about the early mornings: I am a NCSS fan, and DS has music as a sleep cue, and understands 'night night' and 'time to sleep'. I went in when he woke up (keeping it as dark as I could), turned the music on, put him back on his pillow if he was sitting/standing and said the cue words, patting and shhhing once he was lying down. The first few times he was VERY pissed off and resisted big time, but I persisted and he eventually went back off. Turns out he gets his bloodymindedness from somewhere .

After a few mornings he got the message, and sometimes will now either go back to sleep quite easily, or not even wake up until around 6.30am. He even slept until 7am the other day . Still has days when he doesn't buy it but on the whole much better.

HTH

Just a thought to add to all the other great suggestions - might she be cold? We found DD was waking at about 4 when this cold weather started and noticed her room was really cold then. We got her radiator sorted and set the heating to come on at 3 for a bit to warm the room up. Expensive but worth it as 4 am is just grim isn't it!