Waking after an hour - what's it about?

[molejazz]

My 7mo DD has for the past two nights woken an hour after bed and can't be got back down for two hours. Grrrr. I've been trying to get her on a typical routine:

Wake at 7
Nap at 9.30-10/10.30ish
Nap at 1-3
Bed at 7

Problem is, she's been used to much shorter awake times and that 3-7pm stretch seems too much for her so I've been putting her down at 6.15/6.30. Is she not tired enough and therefore waking, or is she overtired???

My daughter is on about the same schedule as yours. She finds that 3-7 stretch really hard as well. I try to keep her awake until 10:00am where she goes down for about 1hour and a half. In the afernoon I try to keep her awake until 2:00 or 2:30, so she's waking up at 4:00ish rather than 3:00, which seems to help.

6:00 seems a bit early for bedtime, maybe she's waking feeling like that was a nap rather than her proper bedtime. I would try to seperate daytime naps from evening bedtime as best you can, by altering the routine you use for them both. Maybe you can add a few more things to her bedtime routine that are quiet, easy activites that will keep her relaxed, but also awake. I find that if we sort of drag out her dinner so she eats it a bit slower and then I get into the bath with her, she finds that more fun and is willing to stay in the bath a bit longer.

I hope this helps :)

Thanks! That does help. Yes my hunch is she's feeling like it's a nap and isn't tired enough. I probably do need to add more into her bedtime routine (like reading stories for instance - at her age we'd been reading to her big brother for months!), it's just so busy at that time of night my tendency is to rush her into bed as soon as she looks tired, is rubbing eyes etc. I think I'm finding it hard to switch from newborn avoidance of overtiredness to older baby getting the stimulation right.

Thanks again.

Does she have a bedtime.bath? I find if I bathe dd when the eye rubbing starts I can eek out another 30mins or so with bath, change, bottle.

Oh and my dd is 1.2 and would struggle.now with a four hour gap. She usually wakes about 3.30 amd is mad shattered by 6.45.