2 year old 5am wake ups and pregnant - advice please!

[5amcrew]

Hello

My DS will be 2 in January and really he’s been waking up anytime between 4:30-6am for the past year. I think we have had 4 weeks of 7/7:30am wake ups scattered throughout the year, so I know he’s capable! I have no idea what I’m doing wrong. I’m 12 weeks pregnant and don’t think I can cope with the early wake ups any longer.

He’s in a single bed with a bed guard as he kept jumping out of his cot head first. He hates his sleeping bag (we have one with legs so he can walk) and doesn’t use his duvet so we layer him up. His routine is something like this:

5am wake up (although today it was 4:53 )
I will go in and lie next to him until about 6ish
6am go downstairs play with his train, have milk and banana
7am this is when we let him watch a bit of tv
8am breakfast (usually porridge)
9am head out to the park
10/11am back home
11:30/12 - lunch
Anytime between 12/1 - nap time. Sometimes he naps for 1hr30, if we are knackered and he’s still asleep we let him sleep for 2hrs
Afternoon we either go out or just play at home.
5pm - dinner
5:30pm watch a bit of tv
6pm we go upstairs and play on our bed for 10 mins (he loves jumping on it) then bath.
6:30/6:40pm in his room for clothes/read a book then in bed.
7-7:30pm usually asleep.

My DH does bedtime and now he’s in a bed he lies down with him until he’s asleep or sleepy enough no to follow him out of the room. He used to fall asleep beautifully in the cot but now he gets upset if we just leave him straight away.


I should add this is what he does when he is with us 4 days a week. When he is with the childminders his naps are hit and miss but I think they give him lunch around 12/12:30 and aim for a nap at 1pm. Some days he doesn’t sleep at the child minders. Some days he does 40mins. Some days 1hr30. The childminders doesn’t keep times of when he sleeps but she doesn’t let the kids sleep beyond 3pm.

Any advice on how to get him to sleep longer? I’ve tried a gro clock for a month but he just gets out of bed and brings the clock into bed yanking the cable out as he does. I’m also worried he’ll wrap the cable around his neck so I’ve fixed it to the floor (hence the yanking of the cable). There is unfortunately nowhere else to put it!

His room is dark, temp is fine (we keep the heating in because he doesn’t have a sleeping bag and rarely uses the duvet.

I should add, a week before the clock change we thought we had cracked it because we started putting him to sleep a bit later (7pm instead of 6:30pm) and he was sleeping in until 7/7:30am. It was bliss. Then the clock change happened and it all went to pot. Any help would be much appreciated!

[5amcrew]

4:15am today. It’s just getting worse. He was with his grandparents yday (child support bubble) as DH was working and to give me a rest but he didn’t nap at theirs and only slept for 10mins in the car on the way back at around 5pm. He was hysterical when he woke up and got home and wouldn’t calm down for over half an hour until we put duggee on. We did dinner, bath and bed by 7pm. I thought he might sleep a bit later today but he woke up screaming hysterically. I left him for 10 mins to see if he would go back to sleep but he just got worse so I went in and was subjected to kicking/screaming/scratching. I tried so hard to stay calm but in the end I burst into tears asking him to please stop hurting me and to go to sleep.

He finally nodded off about 6:30am and I’m just going to leave him to sleep 😴

If this doesn’t get better by the end of the week I think I might invest in a sleep consultant as I can’t continue like this 😔 he clearly needs more sleep that he’s getting but the lack of sleep over the year has probably created this vicious cycle we can’t break free from. I find it extremely difficult to go back to sleep when I wake in the middle of the night so it must be the same for him 😩