4.50am starts HELP

[Etherealhedgehog]

I probably shouldn't be complaining because a couple of short months ago DD (10 months) was waking 5 times a night on average - we sleep trained and she's now fantastic at getting herself down and sleeps through BUT she wakes up at 4.50am EVERY SINGLE DAY. I've gone back to work now and there is honestly no amount of coffee that can keep me going by 2pm, so we really need to fix this....

We're on 2 naps a day, aiming for wake windows of 3 - 3.5 - 4 hrs. She goes to bed at 7pm, can't be earlier if I'm to be home in time for bedtime. Naps are usually about 80 mins in duration but we occasionally still get a crap nap (45 mins or thereabouts) and have started getting longer ones too.

What would you do? The early starts mean her first nap is at 8am...and is sometimes 2hrs long. I know some would probably say that's too much daytime sleep too early, but we've only very recently reached the point where her combined naps are long enough to avoid an overlong wake window before bedtime, so I've been reluctant to shorten them.

Considering trying wake to sleep but as we share a room (one bed flat!) this would be easier said than done, I guess one of us would have to sleep in the living room to be able to set an alarm. If there are tweaks to the schedule that we should try first, I'm all ears!

(And yep, we have blackout blinds, and I don't think she's hungry)

Don't shorten her nap - she needs it.

I would be aiming for 15h sleep in 24h at this stage. So your 3h (max) day time naps would be ok if having 12h nights. But you're getting around 10h, so 13h altogether.

That's really low sleep levels. Some babies are fine on that level if sleep. So if your DD is generally happy, not clingy or grumpy and not showing signs of being over tired - then the answer is make your bedtime 2h later of you want her waking 2h later.

But if it seems like your DD is tired, then the likely reason for waking early is because being over tired makes us all (adults and children) have restless, lighter sleep. So we wake earlier and easier. The way to solve it isn't to focus specifically on the morning wake up time, but on her sleep overall and maximising it - longer naps, earlier naps, more naps.

@FATEdestiny thanks that's really helpful. She's generally fine and doesn't seem overtired unless we keep her up beyond those wake windows so she may just need less sleep (which I had considered but was really hoping not the case!) Though her total time actually sleeping overnight is probably closer to 9.5 than 10 hours, which does seem really low. One thing we have noticed - on the rare occasions when she's awake for a significant amount of time overnight (eg. teething wakes her up and takes a while to settle) she will wake up later - I can't work out if that means that her body needs 9.5 hrs sleep and she's just adjusting her wake up time accordingly or if it suggests that the 4.50 wake up is a habitual thing and wake to sleep might work to shift it. Do you have any thoughts on that?

If it was me, and I had no reason we had to be up early in the morning, I'd make bedtime 9pm. So starting bedtime routine at 8.30pm (or so) and then asleep by 9pm.

That's going to be tricky initially because you'll have to completely change nap times in order to enable her to be up that late. But once the night sleep shifts (which might take 2 or 3 weeks of transition) and waking at a better time - then reassess routine and figure out what works best at that point.

I wouldn't insist on her going to bed at 7pm, but later. If she woke at 4.30am I'd bring her into bed with me where, hopefully, she would go back to sleep.