18 month old- early wake ups

[Thismummyruns]

Hopefully someone will have wise words for me.

DC2 is nearly 18 months. For weeks now, she has been waking up anytime between 5am-6am. She wakes up sobbing every time. Not a little moan where I can leave her to self settle, wake up the house crying.

Her routine roughly is this:

5/6am- wake up and 4oz bottle before breakfast
11am- lunch
11.30am- nap
2pm/2.30pm- wake
4.30pm- dinner
6pm- bath, 9oz bottle
6.30pm- bed

Looking at the above, I wonder whether we should start pushing bedtime later to achieve a later wake but she's so absolutely knackered come 5.30pm I feel stressed just thinking how to get her any later!

What can we do? You'd think I'd know with my 2nd!!

I feel for you - early wake ups are not fun!

Could you put her down for a 10 min power nap in the morning so you can make her lunch nap a bit later? This would help make the bedtime later

Also, is she warm enough? Little ones often wake around 5am if they are a bit chilly as their sleep is super light at this point in the night

My little girl is 17 months and has a similar routine. However she won't go to sleep until 7:30-8:00. She still gets up at 5am every day!
If your girl needs likes to get that much sleep you could just try pushing it back 10 mins at a time so you get it to maybe 7:30 in a few weeks. See how it goes, if she doesn't like it you can always bring it forward again

She is getting lots of sleep. I never minded if it was after 6 am but in the winter 5 am always felt like it was still night time. I would give slowly moving her day forward by 10 mins at a time but it doesn't always work and I wouldn't risk upsetting her routine too much when she is such a good sleeper.

Personally I think the nap is way too long by this age- 1.5hr nap and bed by 7.

The nap is too long, nap and bedtime need to be later.

Once you've tweaked the routine if she's still waking too early, try a gro clock. I thought 18 months might be too young but it worked for DS at that age.

Yep I’d try keeping her up a bit longer each day til nap is more like 1-2.30/3 and bedtime is 7, you’ll probably need to do it gradually. However, last year at the winter clock change, we were having an early waking period with our then 13/14mo old and we just stayed with the new times. Ie she was waking at 5/6 and going to bed 7. We kept her going to bed at same time (but now 8 with the clock change) and voila, 6/7 am wake ups. So can be done cold turkey. Now she is past 2 and bedtime is 7.30, wake up 7, no more than 1hr nap otherwise she wakes early.

Thanks all. Okay, food for thought definitely. I started bath time later tonight so she went to bed roughly 10 minutes later than normal so will keep pushing that over the next week or so.
I did suspect the afternoon nap might be interfering somewhere but I'm so bloody selfish and thoroughly enjoy the peace too much!
My first never slept like her so this is all a novelty to me.
I'll keep a check on that and start working on getting that afternoon nap pushed later too.

@ChelseaCat Funny you should say that, that was the first thing I thought of a few weeks ago and got my DC1's 2.5 tog Grobag out and started double layering her for bed to see whether that helped. It did for a few days and 6.30am wake ups were an absolute dream but the past few days it's been 5.30am again.

I appreciate all your suggestions, I feel bad as she is mostly a good sleeper generally so I can't complain but 5am is a miserable hour some days.

I would give her some porridge before her bottle as well, feed her up and push the bed time to 7pm until she starts to get up later hopefully!

She sounds like a great sleeper just early wakes but her bedtime is early. My 17 month DD does around 10.5 or 11 hours at night so if I put her to bed at your time she would be wide awake early too.
Think your doing the right thing pushing bedtime & nap later slowly x