13 month old nightly wakings at midnight for 3-4 hours

[sconenotscon]

For the past 2 weeks my 13 month old has woken up crying between midnight-1am and will stay awake for 3-4 hours. I end up bringing him downstairs so he doesn't wake the whole household up and he will sit and play with his toys until he falls asleep again. If I try to put him back in the cot while he's still awake he cries again. He doesn't seem to be in pain so I've ruled out teething/illness

For the first 6 months of his life he was a poor sleeper and suffered from reflux but for the past 7 months he has slept from 9pm til 6am with 2 daytime naps. These wakings came on very suddenly with no apparent cause

Any ideas or tips? It's becoming quite hard to function on the little broken sleep I'm getting every night

A bit of porridge in the evening? Might be hunger.

@AlwaysLatte

A bit of porridge in the evening? Might be hunger.

I'll give this a try Thank you

I fancy a bit of porridge now.

He might be ready to move to 1 nap. How much daytime sleep does he have?

What are the timings of his daytime sleep routine?

He normally has 2 naps totalling 3-4 hours. First nap is about 10am second is about 3pm but today he's only had 2 short naps totalling probably 1.5 hours (it was his first day at nursery so he had a lot going on and was too excited to nap)

He's fallen asleep early tonight so I'm going to wake him for some porridge then try to put him down around 8:30ish. Wish me luck!

3-4 hours is quite a lot at that age, I’d try cutting down his naps to see if that helps.

My DD was doing something similar when she was having too much daytime sleep.

Both my children did the same at that age. You're not going to like this but absolutely nothing made any difference except waiting for the phase to pass. Good luck, relax into it, one day they won't do it anymore.

I’m at 14 months with my dd she’s done it for the past 5 months I’m broken. I tried sleep training but she cried until she was sick( max 5 mins). I feel so crap now all the time it feels normal x

He's fallen asleep early tonight so I'm going to wake him for some porridge then try to put him down around 8:30ish. Wish me luck!

I wouldn't wake him up. He probably needs the early night and undisturbed sleep.

How did it go?

He's gone to sleep with a full tummy and hasn't started stirring yet so it's looking good so far but fingers crossed x

@Littleelffriend

I’m at 14 months with my dd she’s done it for the past 5 months I’m broken. I tried sleep training but she cried until she was sick( max 5 mins). I feel so crap now all the time it feels normal x

That's rough @Littleelffriend and I'm so sorry. I'm only 2 weeks in and it's getting me really down so not surprised you're feeling rubbish. I really hope your DD grows out of this phase soon xx

Ugh. Both my kids went thru stages of long night wakings, ds at age 11m and Dd was actually 4 so I'll not go into that. It was the pits and nearly destroyed us. For ds, I employed a sleep consultant to give advice on what to do. The advice was to do classic controlled crying with interval checks. I didn't think it would work in the middle of the night. Especially as he self settled well at bedtime. But actually it did straight away and practically no crying. In hindsight I think me going in and trying to keep him quiet so not to disturb others and trying to settle him back to sleep was actually fueling the wake up. He needed to be ignored a lot more. God luck op!

The Baby Sleep Solution is worth a read to see if that's an approach you'd like to take. I followed it when my daughter was about 10 months old and it worked brilliantly ( unfortunately went out the window a few weeks later when she started nursery and got terrible colds). Or it could just be a developmental 'leap', do you use the Wonder Weeks app?

My 2nd did this, though he would normally pass out after 2 hours. He'd quite often wake up hysterical and then by the time we calmed him down he'd be wide awake and then need a full awake time to go back to sleep.

I honestly don't know what sorted it/can't remember. I think DH maybhave just set a hatder threshold for when we went in. I.e. left him to cry a little longer to let him try to settle himself.

In the meantime sometimes we took him into our bed (kept us both awake) and sometimes I just got into his cot bed with him. Meant I could sleep (if he wasn't poking me in the eye) but he was still safe. He must have been 18 months plua before I thought this was a good idea though as I always was too scared to co sleep until they were big enough to cuddle.

I don’t know if this will help but it might make you feel a bit better and less like baby is good/bad… from the beginning of human civilisation up until Victorian times, humans had biphasic sleep patterns. Basically they did exactly what your baby does. Then things changed to 8 hours continuously really very recently! It’s not that easy because it’s not what humans naturally do.
Decent article on here:
www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783

I reallllyy recommend Fox and The Moon Infant Sleep. She has a Facebook group and she's amazing, she sorted my DS's sleep from not going to sleep, waking up for hours in the middle of the night, feeding to sleep and not napping, within about 3 days and a few little tweaks with her advice he was sleeping through.

Thank you all so much for your replies

Last night he slept from 9:00-5:30! I kept his daytime naps down to a minimum and gave him a bowl of porridge before bed and he's been much more settled (and I feel much more human this morning )

@sconenotscon that’s great news. I don’t think I’m cut out for controlled crying, but could definitely give porridge a go