My 6.5 month old was waking multiple times in the night, sometimes for a feed, often just for a dummy. We ditched the dummy for the first half of the night and used what I suppose was a type of controlled crying, in a form I was comfortable with (I sat with my hand on him until he settled without the dummy; we had a couple of hour-long crying sessions but within a week he was MUCH better and usually sleeping straight through til his feed at about 3 am.) (Hurrah!) However, he is still quite unsettled from about 4 am, and I've been settling him with some combination of feeding (tho don't think he's hungry), dummy, and taking him into our bed, and he usually then sleep through rather fitfully til 6ish. I'm wondering whether to try the same sort of controlled crying on him in the morning. He's definitely still tired, not just ready to start his day that early, but I worry that when it's that close to morning he would just fuss his way to 6 am without going back to sleep at all, which would lead to a pretty crap start to the day and a very overtired baby!
Has anyone got any experience of doing controlled crying (or versions of) for this type of early morning wake up? Did it work?