9 month old waking for the day at 4am

[19SCMSarah]

Are we in the 8-10 month sleep regression? Do we just ride it out??

Baby's turning 9 months next week and for the past few weeks his sleep has started worsening. We're lucky that he's always slept well once he's asleep but he did used to fight it when he was a lot younger. He's currently teething so has calpol as required but has gone from regularly doing 11 hours at night and two decent long naps during the day to approx 9 to 10 hours at night (if we're lucky!) so is back to 2/3 naps which he fights as he is tired and grumpy. The problem is he's waking anywhere between 4-5am and won't go back to sleep. When he wakes so early it gets the whole routine out of sync which is why sometimes he needs the third power nap to make it through to 7pm bedtime.

He usually goes down for the first nap around 2 hours 45 mins after waking and second nap 3 hours 15 mins after waking (so when he used to wake around 5.30am his naps would be approx 8am and 1pm ish.) He will do between an hour to an hour and a half on these naps. Now he is waking so much earlier it throws the whole day off.

We feed or rock to sleep and he has never had any issues with this affecting his ability to stitch sleep cycles so I don't necessarily think this needs to be changed. It's just the issue of how we get him to sleep later at the moment. When he wakes at 4am we've tried feeding or rocking back to sleep but it's often a battle and has limited success so we've started just getting him up for the day. We're exhausted!

What do we do??

The 8 month sleep regression is all about sleep associations, with gross motor skill development added to the mix to create more problems.

But the central reason for your baby's problems at night come down to the way you get him to sleep. The feeding and rocking to sleep means that baby is not going to sleep where they stay asleep (ie in the cot). Instead he's going to sleep in your arms and waking up not in your arms.

The reason this is a problem is because of whats called 'Environment Checks'. These are an evolutionary thing whereby cavemen would sleep in cycles of deep and light sleep, with a brief awake section in between. This awake section is called the envirnment check and is there so that cavemen could check they were safe even during sleep.

In most people (babies and adults) this is only semi-conscious and you wont fully wake. It would just mean rolling over, shuffling position, pulling duvet on/off or similar. Imagine you went to bed one night and as you went to roll over between sleep cycles yourealised you were no longer in bed but were now in the back seat of a car. What would happen? You'd likely be wide awake pretty damn fast thinking WTF just happened. No rolling over semi-awake and going immediately back to sleep.

This is the central cause of the problem. It's really important baby goes to sleep where they stay asleep. If you like to feed to sleep then that's OK, but it means you'll need to embrace feeding lying down and cosleeping, that way baby stays asleep where they fall asleep. Feeding /rocking to sleep are not conducive to independent sleeping in the cot.