summertime morning waking

[strangerthanfiction]

Just wondered if everyone finds their kids wake earlier during the summer months? Dd is 19 months and I remember this happening last summer and it seems to have started happening again now. She usually sleeps til around 7.15 but is now awake between 6-6.30 and is pretty knackered by mid-morning. I've done the usual blackout curtain stuff and her room is pretty dark but still she wakes. Maybe it's the bird song. Anyway I just wondered how common this is and if anyone ever has found a miracle cure!!

6.15 is a good day for us !

What I want to know is why the b***s sleep in on a school day (ie beyond 7.00am, I know heaven for those of you with under 5s) but come the w/k it's up with the 6.00am lark????

Dd's a way off school yet thank goodness! I just truly can't work out why some days she sleeps til gone 7 (even 7.45 occasionally) and others she wakes at 6ish. Nothing else is different in her routine. I mean it's not like the worst problem in the world I know but what tends to happen is that as I'm a very light sleeper I find myself waking at 6 and then lying awake 'waiting' for her to wake up and then feeling like an idiot if she sleeps happily til gone 7.

6.15am again today ... sigh ...

It just throws everything else out as well as dd's shattered by 10.30 and barely eats any lunch even though I give it to her at 11. Then she naps earlier so wakes earlier and is knackered by bedtime.

DS was an early waker, and we finally beat it by a combination of pushing his bedtime to 8pm from 7pm, and him going to one nap a day. This pushed it from 5.30am to a much more acceptable 6.30-7am. However he had been recently going through a phase of waking at 6am. However today he slept till 7.20 - record! Not sure if it was the rainy weather, or the fact that we went swimming yesterday afternoon - at least I got a lie in although I was late for work!

BTW if your DS/DD is on one nap a day and they wake early, I find it works better if you don't let them nap early as then they are exhausted by bedtime and seem to wake even earlier.

How are the early risers doing?

DS (10mths) has taken to waking at 5am, refusing to settle until a bottle is inserted - 9oz later he will go back to sleep but only til 6ish

Yes! Our ds continues to wake between 5 and 6. He is 13 months, and I am just in the process of dropping bf'g which doesn't help. The last couple of days we've decided not to get him up until 6, so he stays in his cot (grumbling, at varying volumes), with dp going in briefly every-so-often to comfort him. (I can't go in 'cos he then wants the boob - shame, I have to stay in bed!) We have tried everything - posted on this board a couple of times - but nothing seems to make any differnece, so now we are just trying to live with it - which means going to bed at 9pm!
gx

I feel a bit weak really grumbling about dd when people have little ones up at 5am. How do your kids cope in the day when they're up that early? Do they have to nap a lot more or very early naps?

Dd, I've realised, seems to go through small cycles of earlier and later waking, which coincide with her having better daytime sleeps. When she's in a good sleeping phase she does 11-12 hours at night plus 2 in the day. In a bad phase she does 10-11 at night and an hour or so in the day. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why these cycles change. So I've decided that I have to live never knowing whether I'll be expected to get up at 6 or 7.

sigh ...

I have reached the point where I want to avoid all these threads, because I KNOW I must be doing something wrong. If dd2 goes on waking so damn early - I will draw a veil over FOUR THIRTY the other morning, that's not the morning it's the middle of the effing night - I don't know what I'm going to do

MI, what would you do if she woke up at 3am and didn't want to go back to sleep? Presumably you wouldn't get up with her? Can you try to pretend that anything before, say 6 or 6.30 really is 3am and act accordingly?
That's basically the approach I've taken. I've also foudn that ds1 is much better this summer than last, when he was around 18 months - I think the 12-24 month stage is a particularly difficult one for morning waking. Have to say though that it was really only a problem for me when we were away from home and I felt obliged to get up with ds1 when he woke early - at home I have been much tougher and mostly just left him (sometimes after going and settling, sometimes with books and toys to play with).
Anyway you didn't ask for advice so apologise if that's not helpful!

DS was better last night - went through from 7 - 6.30 - I have a feeling it is DP that is the problem and not DS!!!

DP was on nightshift last night and all was well, this has happened a few times.

DP is a MUCH lighter sleeper than I am - I wonder if DS still grumbles at 5am but I just dont hear it so dont move which then doesnt wake DS up further?? What to do with that though? Make DP either take a tranquiliser or sleep in the hall!

Elliott, that is helpful. I am trying waiting, and quite often she's OK with playing with toys I've left in her cot. I don't want to go in because she sees my boobies and goes BREKKIE!!! and I can't really blame her. DP does go in sometimes. Sometimes I feed her and put her back.

She finally roused at around 6ish today which is bearable.

After weeks of 6 am wakings, dd has shocked me by sleeping the last two mornings until 8.30. Don't know what has made the difference. It is so bizarre that I keep checking on her to make sure she's breathing!

...5:10 this morning. As I've said before - NOTHING seems to make any difference. We're still trying to leave him in cot 'til 6, and dp went in a couple of times to comfort / reassure him. Having said that, we felt we got off lightly last night as ds didn't wake up during the night despite having a nasty cough, and when I finally went to him at about 5:50 he was swimming in a swamp of snot! Poor lamb.
In reply to question re daytime naps... ds usually has 2 of between 40 mins to 1:15 each. Not a lot, i know, but it is a huge improvement on the 25 mins that was all he used to manage... and actually he is a very happy active boy in between his sleeps - I think he just doesn't need all that much! (I blame my dp who also doesn't need much sleep... but I NEED LOTS!!)
gx

ps - motherinferior... you are NOT doing anything wrong!!

How old is he again GeeCee? And MI, how old is your dd?

My dd is now 21 months (started this thread when she was 19 months I just noticed! AGH!!). She's definitely gone through phases with this and part of the problem is adapting to her changes. When she was under 1 I found the more she slept in the day, the better she'd sleep at night. Since about 18 months if she sleeps too much in the day, or more importantly, too late in the day, she wakes earlier in the morning. Yesterday for instance she had a crap post lunch nap, just 45 mins, as I was on the tube to visit a friend and it's so damned noisy. She had a very busy afternoon and on the way home she dozed off for half an hour which I knew was a bad idea as it was almost 5pm. When she was younger this wouldn't have made any difference but now it does. So this morning she woke at 6.15am instead of the blissful 7.15am she's been doing for the last month or so.

Now, would I ever have thought I'd see myself calling 7.15 a lie-in ... sigh ...