4am start to the day

[Misswhitman]

My little boy is 24 weeks old and for the past week has been waking between 4-5am and been ready to start the day....except he's not because within 20 minutes he's rubbing his eyes and crying but it still usually takes over an hour to get him back down (normally around 6am) only for him to sleep until 7. He's exhausted during the day. He's never been the best sleeper, he's EBF and a couple of weeks ago I started adding a small amount of solids to his diet (baby led weaning). We bed share due to his amount of night waking (approx every 90 minutes). I'm not keen on giving up feeding him to sleep, nor bedsharing. I'm just wondering if anyone else has been through this and if it passed on it's own? I'm like a zombie!

wow! if hes not waking until 4am at his age, I think he's doing amazingly!

what time do you put him to bed OP? early wakings often come with too late a bed time.

He used to have a bath at 6 and be asleep by 7pm. Now I've moved that forward because he's so exhausted but I'm going to try his old bedtime again tonight. When he used to go to bed at 7pm he would wake at 10:30, 12ish, 2ish, 3:30, 4:30, 6 and 7am roughly. Then he used to have his first nap of the day without fail bang on 10:30/11am. I'm at my wits end, we had another 4am start this morning and this time I just got him up instead of trying to get him back to sleep because he was wide awake, refused a feed (the only time he does so) and chatting to me.

(I breastfeed him back to sleep every time he wakes)

i used to just get up at 5am with my Ds as it was easier than trying g to get him off to sleep again. Means you have to go to bed silly early though. Have you tried him with his own bed again? Could it be that in your bed he's being disturbed hence all the waking?

This morning I got up with him at 4:30am and under the HV advice I kept him awake until 9am. He's just slept for 45 minutes. I'm hoping this will lead to a lunchtime and afternoon nap so I can push his bath back to 6:30. Yeah I did consider the bed sharing but I widthways on a king size mattress and he's completely up the other end so that he's nowhere near the blankets and pillows. Tried him in a crib and he just wakes up after 30 mins 😩

Sounds tough @Misswhitman. I reckon he's overtired. I read somewhere that most babies are chronically overtired and it sounds like his (and your) sleep is disturbed a lot.

Have you tried implementing the '2 hours awake' then nap schedule? I stuck to it like clock work up until recently as it worked really well for us. I know naps are sleeping are tough but if you manage to get him into a good routine things might get easier at night.

He was quite good a few weeks ago, would go down roughly every 2 hours at pretty much the same times every day, then the 4am thing started. I really try to put him down as soon as I notice a glazed expression or a yawn but he fights hard! Today he was better with his naps after keeping him up so fingers crossed! Not sure if it's him learning something new or the transition on to solids? He's definitely overtired though you're right.