Long awake period at night

[chloechloe]

DD is 7 months old and has taken to having a long awake period every single night where it´s virtually impossible to get her back to sleep.

Generally it happens at 5am, although sometimes it´s earlier. On a really good night it takes 1-1.5 hours to get her back to sleep, but during one horror episode it took 3.5 hours from 1am!

At first she´s wide awake and wants to play and roll around the cot (she´s learning to crawl and seems desperate to practise at night as well!) Then she gets tired and cranky and cries. I usually end up rocking her to sleep, but even then she totally resists sleep and hits me or thrashes about to keep herself awake. When she falls asleep she wakes up the second I lay her down on the bed (I guess I need to wait for her to be in a deeper sleep, but by this point my patience is thin!).

We have a good going to sleep routine and ironically during this period she´s been dropping off to sleep amazingly well, either on her own or with a bit of shushing. On the one hand I´m loathe to start introducing bad habits like rocking her to sleep but then I wonder if it´s just a phase and I should just do whatever I need to do to get through it.

Any advice would be gratefully received!

I'm having a similar experience. My DD is 9 months old and started doing this about 2 months ago. Every couple of nights she wakes, rocking on all fours. Not crying, but just rocking. I go in soothe her, leave the room, and do this at intervals. Finally 2 hours later (like clockwork) she settles back to sleep. I did rock in the beginning, but she was just hitting me and thrashing so i stopped. And now i just put her back lying down and pat her back. I wish i knew the answer. It seems to happen if she doesn't have a long afternoon nap, but then not always...

Sorry - meant to say - no advice, but lots of empathy...

Not much advice but some hope, dd did this but she's now 10 months and it's stopped totally. It's tough while you're in the midsts of it though

Thanks for your replies. It´s good to know I´m not the only one! I´m a bit worried that I might be in for months of this though! It´s already been a sleepless month after 2 weeks where she had a cold and then fever after her immunisations. I´m sooo tired!

Have you tried feeding her? Is there a chance she is hungry? Is it worth introducing a dreamfeed when you go to bed (say around 10/11pm) to 'reset' her sleep click and make sure she isn't hungry.

She's definitely not hungry mint as I feed her. I'm not convinced she needs it though, I think it's more for comfort than anything else.

I've never given her a dream feed as I've always been too nervous about waking her! Do you think it would work introducing one at such a late stage? At the moment she has a bottle and a BF top up at around 7pm and then she tends to wake for another feed at around 00:30. One night she did sleep through from 8pm to 4am though (a very rare occurence!)