6 month old won’t go back to sleep at 3am - help!!

[MissingSleep100]

My 6 month old seems to develop a new pattern of sleep every few weeks, none of them involve sleeping through yet, and as my first didn’t until he was 2 I’m not really expecting that either, but this latest pattern just feels totally unmanageable.

She’s going to bed at 7, fed to sleep (ebf) and then being held all evening, generally then fed again about 10 and put down in the bed next to me. She’ll generally wake again at 1 (sometimes at 11.30 too, and sometimes another wake) and will be fed back to sleep quite swiftly. She’s then waking at 3, I’m feeding back to sleep as usual…but she then out of nowhere she just wakes up completely and will stay awake for 2-3 hours. Some nights she’s screaming, some nights more playful. Tonight we tried rocking to sleep first instead of feeding at this time, but after 10 minutes it became clear she was awake - cue trying to feed her which didn’t work either. We’re not stimulating her, we’re using white noise and the room is dark (although could be darker I think so blackout blinds are on order).

I’m quite accepting of this kind of thing happening once or twice, but it’s happening every night and seems to just be a new ingrained pattern no matter how we approach the initial wake. It’s obviously exhausting, especially when the toddler wakes almost as soon as she’s eventually gone back to sleep. My experience is that nothing I do will probably help but I’m really worried that this is now a habit. Her daytime sleep is usually poor but the last two days she has had a short nap plus a two hour nap and that’s not made a difference. Any advice or just solidarity/hope that this will end would really help as it really is breaking me (if you’ve made it this far, thank you and well done!!)

So if she’s going back to sleep between 5-6am, what time is she then waking up for the day?

Split nights are usually from an imbalance of day sleep (more often than not from too much napping) but you say she doesn’t usually nap well. What’s her current schedule like?

Thanks for your reply. She’s then waking between 7 and 8 for the day. Her days still seem really unpredictable as she has to fit in around my toddler a lot and just feeds on demand, as she’s become more distracted while feeding she’s much more of a ‘snacker’. On a typical day (if such a thing exists) she’ll generally be ready for another nap within a couple of hours of waking but this is very often only about 20/30 minutes. She then might have another nap around 1 or 2 o’clock which sometimes is again only short if the toddler disturbs her, or can be an hour or two if I cuddle her in a dark room!! If she has the short nap she might have another cat nap at 5, but she won’t if she manages a long one. We’re just starting to explore solids but she’s not taking much, hoping this might bring a bit more structure to the day though! It feels like it could be down to so much developing etc going on currently?! Who knows!

My youngest went through a similar phase. I believed them to be spilt nights and they passed after a couple of weeks. Nothing I seem to do made them better. I just let her come into my bed and mess around until she went back to sleep.

We have also just come out the other side of the '18 month sleep regression' that was worse. I'm trying to catch up on sleep now before something else throws her sleep pattern out the window 🙈