Early waking nightmare...

[Humania]

dd2 is 11.5mo and has been sleeping through since about a month ago so I feel incredibly fortunate for that. Initially she woke around 6ish which was perfectly manageable, but it's been steadily getting earlier and earlier and we have now got to the unearthly 4.30am and she will just not go back to sleep. I usually cave in and bf her around 5.15 in the hope that she'll settle but she rarely does. We've tried blackout blinds, leaving her to yell (horrible), earlier bedtime, moving naps, shortening naps (she has 2 good naps every day - around 2.5 - 3 hrs in total) but nothing seems to work. Also have 3.9yo dd1 who gets woken by dd2 and then I start the day with 2 crying/yelling/tantrumming girls who need more sleep. Any advice gratefully received as I've recently gone back to work and am really starting to struggle

Not hungry is she? Snack before bedtime perhaps worth a try

Thanks Nevercan... I meant to say she eats like a horse and has 3 big meals a day, as well as 2 bfs so I think that's unlikely. I try to get as much into her as possible at dinner and she's in bed an hour later

No advice I'm afraid Humania but eyebags of sympathy. We're going through the early waking thing too, DS is 10.5 months...

Sorry no advice, my DD who is 14months has been doing this too, started about Jan 50:50 between 6.00 and 5.30, now we're luckyto get 5.30 once a week. It's been 4.45 for the last few nights. We just lie there trying to doze while she whinges, sometimes I give in if she gets properly upset buy we usually make it to 6 before I get her.

We have been trying later bedtime for about a week and that isn't working either. Had to give in tonight though put her in cot 6.45 because teething misery probably combined with a week of 9hrs sleep a night was not a recipe for a pleasant evening...

Wish you better luck than me. Join us on the early eskers whinge thread if you like - quite a few mums seem to have deserted me recently!

Wakers, not eskers. What's an esker when it's at home?!

wake to sleep...just mentioned it on another thread, you rouse them just before you know they will wake, they go back to sleep, I did it with DD1 for her naps, worked well. Google it!!

I am in this situation too :(
My dd is 5 1/2 months and used to sleep 6.30 -6.30 (sometimes 7) every night. About 2 weeks ago, she started waking at 5.30ish and this morning it was 4 30.
We have tried everything, like OP. She doesn't wake up crying, she lies there slamming her legs down on the mattress, shouting and blowing raspberries but then starts to cry when she realizes nobody is coming to get her up.

She has never been a great napper so I am really struggling. Help please.

Thanks all - sorry to hear so many others are struggling too. I have heard of wake to sleep I will investigate but sounds a bit scary! What if you wake them even earlier and they don't go back to sleep?!

I will check out the early waking thread too thank you

We are having exactly the same problem! I was going to start a thread about it today! She used to sleep 7.30-6ish, then feed and go back to sleep until about 9. I thought I was the luckiest mum on the planet! She's never mapped in the day but I've not minded because she slept so well at night.

Just in the last two weeks it's taking until 8pm to put her down at night and she's awake ready to get up at 4am now. It's got gradually earlier over a week or so. She's woken in the night a couple of times too. She's 6mo. And she still isn't napping in the day so she's just in a horrible mood all the time because she's exhausted and so am I!

We've tried blackout blinds, extra feeds, changing bedtime etc but nothing has worked.

I'm going to read about wake to sleep but any other ideas would be greatly appreciated too!

OP - can you post a typical day's routine for us so we can see what time she wakes, takes her naps & goes to bed? Early waking is often linked to too long & too early a morning nap & since you say she takes 2 long naps its my guess that one may need pushing later & shortening. 10/11 months is typical age for things to go wonky as LO's start to make the gradual transition from 2-1 naps. This can be very quick for some LO's but for others it can be a very gradual process taking many months. Most babies don't fully transition to 1 nap until between 15-18 months so you are a way off yet!

Can you also tell me when you tried shortening one of her naps, which one did you cap, how long did you let her nap for & for how long did you try it i.e. just 1 day, a few days, a week or more ??? Sometimes these things can take a good few weeks to put right but we can all be guilty of trying for a day or two & not getting instant results so we decide its not working & try something else (I am very guilty of doing this lol!) when in reality we haven't given it enough time to work IYSWIM?

HTH.x

Thank you omama I'll try to give you as much information as possible. dd2 is 11.5mo and on 3 big meals a day plus 2 snacks and 2 bfs. She still sleeps in our room as we only have 2 bedrooms and she would wake dd1 if in with her. I work part-time so for 3 days a week I don't have as much control over her naptimes (at nursery) but a typical day for the other 4 days goes like this:

4.30-5am she wakes and I usually feed her within about 10 minutes as she starts to yell. Feed lasts ~half an hour and then she's ready to be up. Morning nap used to be 8am-ish but a few weeks ago managed to shift it to 9am. But it lasts around 1-1.5hrs. I suspect this is too long but she has been so shattered and miserable in the morning that it seems counter-intuitive to wake her. Also I haven't had the heart to but I guess I may need to toughen up a bit. Afternoon nap is 1pm for 1.5-2hrs. Bedtime used to be 7.15 but for the last week or so have shifted it to 6.45.

I tried to shorten the morning nap to 45mins a couple of weeks ago but only for a few days. Do you think we should try again before thinking about wake to sleep?

I hope no-one minds but I'm going to post DDs routine here too because any advice is greatly welcome!

She's just 6mo and we're beginning BLW which she is loving.

Today was a fairly typical day:
She woke up at 5am (usually though it's closer to 4) and came into us to feed.

She finally fell back to sleep at just gone 6am until about 6.30 and then she was up and awake.

She was tired fairly early on in the morning but wouldn't nap in her cot or feeding. I went out at 10.30 and she fell asleep in the car but woke up as soon as the car stopped so she only had about 10-15 minutes then.

We had lunch and she fell asleep on my shoulder at 1.45 until 2.15. We left my friends at 4 and she fell asleep in the car and stayed asleep until about 5.15.

I haven't put her to bed just yet but we do the same thing every night. Bath is at 6.30, then story, then feed at about 7pm and she feeds to sleep. It doesn't take her long to drift off but the very second a move she wakes up and screams so I have to sit up there for a good half an hour after she's fast asleep so that she's asleep enough to move her to her cot. She then sleeps from let's say 8ish until she wakes between 4 and 5.

It's now 6.15pm and since 5am this morning she's had about 2-2.5 hours sleep in total. This doesn't seem like anywhere near enough for a 6mo!

I think you may need to shorten the morning nap for a couple of weeks before you can judge its effectiveness.

At about a year old, my DD was waking at 5am every day, sleeping for 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours after lunch (approx). I assumed she needed the sleep in the day because she was waking early. Then someone suggested that she might be waking early because she was sleeping so much in the day. I'd never thought of it that way round.

I started by cutting her MN to 45 minutes and encouraging a good 2 hours at lunchtime. I kept a diary (which I've still got) and it took 6 weeks of doing this for us to get to the hallowed 7am waking (she was in bed by 7pm)! I thought about giving up assuming it wasn't working, but for some reason I didn't. She is now a brilliant sleeper although we've had to keep on top of her naps to make sure her nighttime sleep isn't affected. She dropped her morning nap at 14 months and then her lunchtime nap went at just over 2 (sob). But she sleeps so well at night that it's worth it. Hope that helps. :)

Somersaults its not always about the total amount of sleep they get in the day (although this is very important) but also the timing of naps. In your case she's catnapping during the day but not having one good long rest which is restorative. I think your DD is overtired and would probably benefit from a routine where you encourage her to sleep at the same times each day so you can see what is going on and where to tweak things if her nighttime sleep continues to be disturbed.

I'd say a 30/45 min morning nap followed by a 2 hour lunchtime nap and a possible 30 min catnap late afternoon is a good guide for an average 6 month old.

Any tips on how to get her to nap?! She just screams if I put her in her cot!

Thank you loveis that really gives me hope! I will give it a go for a few weeks and see how we get on...

humania - loveis has pretty much said exactly what I'd have said too. You've done the right thing shifting the morning nap to 9ish but yes its too long. I think you will need to cut it back to 45mins max, possibly nearer to 30mins. And I also think you may need to push the morning nap a wee bit later still, so it starts no earlier than 9.30am. As you cut the morning nap shorter, you may need to bring the afternoon nap earlier, as she won't be able to last as long before needing another sleep.

At 11ish months my DS was also waking very early (4-4.30am) & was having a very early morning nap of 8am for 1hr & I gradually pushed it later & shortened it until we were at the following:

Up 6-6.30
Nap: 9.30-10
Nap: 12.30-2.30
Bed: 7pm

It took us 4-6 weeks to get to that routine & he did get overtired in the process & I too thought about giving up but I didn't want the EW to continue so I persevered. It took a lot of patience & consistency to get through it but I can't tell you enough how glad I am that we did it. He dropped his morning nap completely at 15 months & we are now in the process of cutting back his lunchtime nap at 21months.

somersaults, as someone who has been totally unable to do much about getting DD to stay asleep longer than 45-50mins until she dropped to one nap about 6 weeks ago and who had a very clingy little girl I am sympathetic to mums who struggle to get into a routine. For us, it was definitely important to get her to sleep during the day though or we were all miserable. If it suits you parenting style, why not aim to give her two naps a day, start the first about 3 hours after she wakes and the second 3 hours after she wakes from the first (though I found it beneficial to not let my DD nap before 9am when she was a bit older, say 7 months). If you struggle to get her to have one, I wouldn't hesitate to rock and cuddle her, walk with her in a sling or pushchair, or even drive her in the car if you can find a method to get her to take a few minutes kip. I know some mums are dead set on the cot, but my DD was pretty unreliable in the cot when younger. Admittedly, 6mo was about the time that she started napping ok in the cot, but if there's something funny going on I still have to resort to other means even now at 14mo. My mum actually drove her then sat in the car for an hour this afternoon having spent 2 hours trying to get her to lie down!

P's sorry OP, didn't mean to encourage a hijack! It sounds like your LO does sleep quite a lot during the day so maybe the nap capping in the morning will help you - I wish you luck!

Thanks all the advice is much appreciated and I'm feeling a lot more positive Somersaults I hope your EW improves too.. . and hopefully we can come back and post in a few weeks with some progress

I'm in the same situation DD is 12 months and has been getting up earlier and earlier for the past couple of months. I used to think 5.30am was nightmarish - now I'd sell my granny for a 5.30 start! This morning she woke us at 4am and I had to go through at 4.50 because she was starting to yell, so we've been up since then. Sometimes she'll nod back off after a BF but increasingly less so. Finding this thread today has already made me feel slightly less desperate :-) Like loveis, I've always thought DD's long naps were because she wasn't getting enough ZZZs at night, but now I realise it could well be the other way round. A usual non-nursery day (4 out of 7) goes: 4.30 to 5.30am up and breastfeed, 8-10am nap, 2-4pm nap, bed 7.30pm. She's been slow to solids but is now eating 3 reasonable meals a day with snacks and BFs in between. I think I'm going to have to try pushing back and shortening the morning nap and seeing if that works. Can't really contemplate getting up this early for much longer, it's so hard now I back at work 3 days. Thanks for the support and advice - feels like a lifeline!

In the same boat here. Ds (nearly 9 months) has never been a good sleeper. He now sleeps from a 10.30 dreamfeed to 5 am but rarely gets past 5... (yawn)

fifi my DD was a bugger for going down in her cot, I used to actually cry about it (god knows why??). I ended up letting her sleep wherever she would but keeping to the times and lengths of naps. Eventually, at about 9 months, she got the hang of going into the cot and by 14 months I could pop her in and walk out the room. Some of them are resistant to where the nap takes place but I always considered I could control when she slept and for how long.

annie it was a lightbulb moment for me when I realised 4 hours a day was too much for a one year old! I even had HVs telling me to give her more sleep...

loveis my problem has always been being unable to keep her to sleep for the 'required' duration! Not a fat lot you can do about that I'm afraid, until they work it out for themsleves. As you can see above though I was pretty keen on keeping sensible gaps between the naps. It worked pretty well. She's been a decent sleeper (though hideous early riser for the last few months) since 6 months.