5 month old waking an hour after bedtime

[pickledsausage]

Having several sleeping problems with my 5 month old but this is the main one. When he goes down in the evening he’s only sleeping for an hour before waking, we settle, he wakes repeat x100. Has anyone had this? What did you try?

He’s having approx 3 naps a day, awake 2.5 hours at a time, feeding regularly etc. I just don’t know where I’m going wrong.

Thanks in advance!

How many times does he wake at night? It could be the 4 month sleep regression. I'm going through it at the moment and it's been 2 months of this!

How does he settle to sleep? Do you help him in anyway as it could be that he needs assistance in going back to sleep once he wakes from a sleep cycle of 45 mins or so.

Is he feeding plenty in the day? Some babies like to cluster feed on an evening.

Also, want to add that you're not going wrong anywhere! Sometimes you could be doing everything right and lil bubba just won't comply! We forget that they're little humans and not robots

My Dd used to do this at that age (she's 6 now). She used to be up for over an hour then, if not 2, often cluster feeding. I would stay up in the dark because I had 'put her to bed'. In hindsight I wish I'd taken her downstairs, kept dim lights and put the TV on quietly!

Can your little one link sleep cycles?

The classic thing here (I've since learnt) would be overtiredness. Try putting to bed a bit earlier.

Otherwise wait 2 months and things are bound to be different again! They change so fast.

You're not going wrong
They are being a perfectly normal baby

This was one of the major sleep regression symptoms for us and whilst we are definitely still in the regression now, this particular symptom has largely resolved (she now either wakes once in the evening or often not at all). Tbh, we didn't really do anything I don't think, suspect it was largely just time passing but it may have helped that I started paying more attention to nap timings - various things I read suggested this can happen due to overtiredness at bedtime. Are you sure 2.5 hrs is the right wake window, is it worth experimenting with shorter? (I think we were on 2hrs max at 5 months, but then she was a terrible napper)

@pickledsausage We’re going through this at the moment and finding it so hard. How long did it take before this phase ended? Did you do anything different? X