4 month old treats bedtime as a nap

[sunlightflower]

For the past few weeks my DD aged 4 months has woken after one sleep cycle at bedtime.

I then have to try and settle her back to sleep. Sometimes it's straightforward and sometimes it takes ages!

She goes to sleep on her own in her next2me, with white noise and a dummy. She wakes whether the dummy has fallen out or not.

Has anyone had this and how did you fix it? I've read lots of old threads on here but it seems nobody found the solution...

The internet tells me she is overtired (I've learned that the internet tells me pretty much any sleep problem is down to overtiredness...) so I worked really hard to make sure she had great naps all day yesterday and it didn't work! Also I'm not convinced she is overtired to be honest, she seems pretty contented during the day.

I'm wondering if she might be undertired? She's going to bed at 7pm which I thought was an age appropriate bedtime, but maybe it's not.

Grateful for any thoughts!

Sounds like the 4 month sleep regression which doesn't really help you. Basically she'll be learning how to independently string those sleep cycles together. Mine was crap at it and took forever to learn so we sleep trained.... Others might have better advice!

What's her day time sleep routine look like?

@eggofmantumbi Oh no, really? I was hoping to avoid sleep training as I didn't need to do it with my older DD... What kind did you do and when?

You're right though, she does have trouble linking sleep cycles and only takes single sleep cycle naps during the day too but I know that can be normal at this age.

@yukka she has 4-5 short naps a day (around 40 mins each), with wake times between 1.25 and 1.75 hours. Even in the sling or pram, she only very very rarely naps for longer than one sleep cycle.

Up until somewhere around 6 months old, I would treat "daytime" as all the way up until you go to bed - so say 11pm?

The primary reason for this is Lullaby Trust SIDS advice that you should be in the same room as baby for all of their sleeps. So assuming you are not in bed at 7pm, then neither should baby. This is up until 6 months at least.

The other reason is, as you have found, many babies don't settle into their big sleep easily at this age and need resettles. Plus, when the big block of sleep is likely to be 6 or so hour it is better (for you) is that block is from 11pm onwards, rather than from 7pm onwards.

So I would suggest that after you do your normal bedtime routine., that you settle baby to sleep in their normal daytime sleep place downstairs. Then resettle until a time comes that you're ready to go to bed - when you take baby up with you, feed and re-settle upstairs (hopefully for a big block of sleep)

We did controlled crying at about 7 months. She barely cried though so it wasn't too bad. I know it's not for everyone but I was delirious. my second is 3 months and I'm just waiting for it to come....

@eggofmantumbi you might be lucky! My eldest didn't really go through a 4 month regression, I remember everyone talking about it and just keeping quiet...

Maybe no such luck this time

The key things I followed were to not let them nap after 5pm if you want them to sleep from 6:30/7, create a bedtime routine that is different to how you put her down to nap. Get a white noise toy (Ollie the Owl is great) which will automatically come on when she wakes and see if it soothes he back to sleep.

It could be the 4 month regression, which hopefully will be done in a week or two, but the other things have helped our dd be a great sleeper.

It's a sleep regression, I don't see the point in sleep training now as their sleep changes so much in the first year anyway