1 yo and Early Morning Waking - I am losing the plot, please help!

[shatteredboo]

I have just about got to the end of my tether with DS and constant early morning waking. It's starting to cause issues with my DP and I as we are so sleep deprived we end up being vile to one another. I'm finding it very very hard to get through the day.

Just a bit of background:

DS has always been a pretty terrible sleeper, up until very recently, he was waking several times in the night and needing a BF to send him back off. I would only be getting around 3 hours at a time max. Fingers crossed, I seem to have night weaned him now and it doesnt seem to be milk that he is waking up for. Gone are the days when a BF would magically send him back off again, it just doesn't do the trick any more.
His bed time is between 6,30 and 7pm and although I am extremely grateful that he is no longer waking multiple times throughout the night, he wakes up EVERY morning anywhere between 4.30 and 5.45. I honestly cant remember the last time he was up after 6am.
He usually wakes up crying and there is nothing that DP or I can do get him back to sleep. He just wants to be up for the day. This has been going on for months now and I am really suffering.

He has blackout blinds, so its not the morning light thats waking him, and although he used to feed to sleep at night, he now gets himself off to sleep with just a little fuss, so its not that he cant self settle.

As DS is BF, (which I don't regret for a second btw) I have always been the one to get up to him in the night, so after nearly a year of night feeds falling solely on me, I'm now having to cope with this early morning waking too.

I'm going back to work in a few weeks and I am absolutely dreading it. I could cry sitting here writing this. I'm a primary school teacher and teach early years, so starting my day at 4.30, then going to work all day with very young children will just about finish me off I think. (This is also why going to bed very early to get more sleep isn't really an option for me as I have school work to do most nights.)

He has always been a really crap napper too. Up until he was around 7 months, he would only nap for 30 minutes at a time, no matter what I did (and I did try EVERYTHING). I just never had any time to collect myself and just felt like it was a constant treadmill of misery. (excuse the dramatics - thats sleep deprivation for you!) SO the old 'sleep when the baby sleeps' has just never been possible.

He's now having 2 naps a day. One at 9.30-10, then another after lunch at 1.30. I usually have to resettle him after half an hour, and on a good day he'll sleep til about 3.

So, my question for you wise ladies is: Will dropping his morning nap help combat this EMW? And could this help extend his afternoon nap? This seems to be a popular solution looking online through various forums.
As he is waking so early in the morning, he is absolutely desperate for his nap by the time 9.30 comes around, so I just dont know what to do for the best.

I really hope someone has some words of advice, I feel like such a shit mum at the moment, I'm a complete zombie for the first couple of hours of the day (and the rest......) and feel like I'm not giving DS the attention he deserves. I just have no energy.
I would dearly love another child and always thought I would have more, but the way things are going at the moment I think DS will end up being an only child, which makes me really, really sad. I just can't go through this again.

I consider 9pm to be too late because it would mean DS would have an awake time of up to 6 hours between his last nap and bed time, and for most 1 year olds this would result in over tiredness.

Not odd or arbitrary.

If you had a 9pm bedtime then naps would just be later though

Hi OP similar situation here my DS has just turned 1. He rarely sleeps more than 10.5 h at night, waking 4-5am, but just these last couple of weeks he has started sometimes going past 6 which is brilliant! I'm recently back at work so know its tough-tbh the only thing that makes it bearable is that my dh and I now take turns to get up with him so when I am up at 4/5am at least I know I get a "lie-in" the following day.

OP, I feel for you! Sleep deprivation is just the worst.

Maybe fiddling with the naps is the solution? I posted about naps last week and ended up pushing DS's morning nap back by about 90 mins. He's 10.5mo.

Now he sleeps for about 2hours 25 mins and then no afternoon nap.

I bring him to bed about 7 and he's asleep about 7.30. He doesn't sleep through the night but he isn't ready to start the day before 6am! We had a hairy July where he was waking pre 6 and it was killing me.

Good luck and I really hope you get some decent rest soon.

Thank you everyone, it's good to know (in the nicest way possible) that I'm not alone.

Going to try and cut back his morning nap over the next week or so and see how it goes. Hopefully this will help him sleep longer in the afternoon too.

This too shall pass, this too shall pass....

I 100% agree with hollie.

It's a curiously British thing to put children to bed so early. Apart from anything else, if their last meal of the day is at or before 5pm they are going to be starving by 5am! And of course you'll be desperate to dispatch him as early as possible because you are chronically sleep deprived and your baby is beyond cranky by 6pm.

If your baby is a rubbish sleeper anyway, it's all about self-preservation. So the key is to synchronise your main blocks of sleep. So shift your baby's whole routine by a couple of hours (gradually) and put him to bed much closer to your own bedtime. You can move it forward bit by bit as he gets bigger, able to last longer without food, and still sleep through to a time you deem acceptable.

Just a thought- is he going to childcare when you go back to work? Because you might find that he's so bloody knackered at the end of the day that he sleeps straight through

OP, I feel for you. 4.30am is not morning, although 5.30am is not unusual for a 7pmish bedtime. I agree that 9pm is late; you risk overtireness and early waking anyway.

I would agree with trying to get that morning nap as late as possible, maybe even start the 2 to 1 nap transition if you think he can do it.

Remember, it is a phase. It might be a long one, and you might want to tear your hair out during it, but he will not wake at 4.30am forever.

Why would you risk over tiredness? So long as a child gets enough sleep, why does it matter if it's a traditional British 7pm or later?

Firm believer here in the notion that the more sleep they get at that age the more they will take. Children need a lot of sleep, thats a fairly wide held belief. Some need more, some less.
DC2 was not a great sleeper. HOWEVER this changed, at about 12/13mo, and suddenly we were all sleeping til 7. Changed my life! Did have a bit of a kick back in the evenings where there would be talking and moaning til 8-8.30, but now its 7pm to 6.45am. And thats on top of two naps in the day, which for a 17mo is a lot.
I haven't read the whole thread in detail, but I would actually bring his morning nap forward to about 8.30. Plan lunch for 12, and second nap at 12.30-1 at the latest.
If he is waking 30 mins after he goes down, then I think he sounds overtired. It also sounds like might need a little coaching on how to resettle himself (sounds like he is fine to get himself off to sleep, but hasn't joined the dots when he wakes early).
How is he when he wakes? That's probably the key to whether he needs more or less sleep. If he is happy and smiling and raring to start the day/morning/afternoon, then yes, perhaps he needs sleep consolidation. If he wakes screaming the house down, my inclination would be that he is overtired and in a rut he can't get himself out of.
I haven't had it as bad as you, and I was in a right state. You have my sympathies.

Picnic's post makes a lot of sense!

Sympathies, 14 mth old DS has been waking at between 4am and 5.30 since January. For about 3 mths it was always before 4.45am. It was awful. Short term you need to get a lie-in ASAP to recharge and give you some energy to change things. Dh shares the pain with me otherwise I'd have gone insane.

I've found that ds sleeps around 9hrs at night whatever time we put him down so later bedtimes pushed it to the 5.30am end of wakings. He sleeps latest when he has just a 30min nap in the day.

I appreciate I have children who don't need much sleep (dd was the same and apparently so was I !) as he usually woke quite cheerful. Teething definitely made the early wakings worse though and thankfully a load just popped through so I'm hoping the worst is behind us. Today he woke at 7.15 am - HEAVEN!!! Does that give you hope?!

I'm afraid I haven't much hope to offer being up with my 2 year old since 5 am, other than all my friends' babies went through this and it passed fairly quickly. Just not for my DS!
The later bedtime didn't work for us- he ended up sleeping 8.30 to 5.30 so he just lost an hour. We have phases of respite where he'll do a week of 6.30 waking but he always reverts to 5.30. It's worth trying all the suggestions on here as they may well work for you. Regarding work- I have a commute and a fairly intense job (though not with children) and have survived. Largely on an insane amount of coffee which I can't have now I'm pregnant .