16 week old falls asleep at 5pm

[xwhoiamx]

My 16 week old thinks 'bedtime' is anything from 4.30 to 7 pm and will nod off in his rocker chair/while being held during these hours and be out for the night. This is massively unhelpful, not least because I go back to full time work in a month and am unlikely to be home before he has fallen asleep! Any tips for keeping him up later? Other than repeatedly poking him?

Of note :
-He's a poor napper, can nap for as little as 15 mins at a time and can only occasionally be resettled for a longer sleep
-He naps much better in his crib than downstairs so we're transitioning him 1 nap at a time to the crib BUT he then sleeps for 2.5 hours + at the crib naps and STILL falls asleep at 5pm that eve
-His total naps are currently about 1.5 hours a day and there is absolutely no pattern to them whatsoever.
-we are trying to introduce a bedtime routine but it's repeatedly thwarted because he falls asleep at wildly varying times so short of starting it at 4pm, which most days is massively too early and he won't be tired, and moving out by 10 mins every day (which I calculate will take 3 weeks) I don't know what to do. I currently wake him at 6.30 pm to do the routine but don't know if this is pointless!
-he sleeps soundly at night, sometimes waking for a feed in early eve if he's fallen asleep very early (or if he doesn't I dream feed at 10pm), then again at 2-3am, then up for the day at 6.30-7, also often wakes around 4.30 and thinks it's morning and starts vocalising but can be resettled

Help - do I just poke him and try to keep him awake until a reasonable hour or what? Or tolerate the current situation as he otherwise sleeps not too badly and have him not see me Mon-Fri?

I'd leave him to it at assume that he'll have changed again in the next month.

I can't help but my baby is a few weeks older than that and very similar in that 5pm he gets super tired regardless of what time he napped in the afternoon

Leave him to it, I think. It will change again no doubt, especially when you start solids. My DS is 16 weeks and I go back to work next week. He can not tolerate a bathtime later than 5pm and will be pretty much asleep by 6, but keeping him up when he’s tired just so I can see him would be unfair, IMHO. Good luck with going back!

What time are you aiming for? His bedtime is likely to naturally get later over the next few weeks and months anyway. You could avoid rockers or holding him around that time as that will encourage him to fall asleep, but my middle one was like this. By 5ish he was fully grumpy and needed to go to bed, but a few months later settled to going bed at 7.

I'd probably make it a nap if it was that early.

Thanks for the reassuring responses. I may just wait it out and hope it spontaneously changes, and in the meantime enjoy eating my evening meal in peace

@Isittimeforbed I guess ideally I'd like his bedtime to be around 7pm, so on the days he's still awake to do it, I do a bedtime routine about 6.30pm.

What's his normal awake time between naps?

Mine all had a late afternoon nap until about 6 months. I'd treat a 4.30/5pm sleep as a nap, no longer than 30 minutes, then do bath/feed/bed around 7-7.30pm.

Oops. We have experimented and discovered that he is actually just hungry at 5pm. A quick bottle then and he's good until 6.30.