In a mess with 14mo nap/sleep schedule

[Liverpoolgirl50]

Hello,

Feel like I’m stuck in a vicious circle with DD’s sleep.. she wakes up at 5:20am every day like clockwork and nothing changes this (later bed time, bottle on waking, big carby dinner and bottle before bed, wake to sleep, popping dummy back in and leaving her - we’ve tried the lot). We do leave her in her cot til 6am every day though.

But this means by 8:30 she’s absolutely done and needs a nap. Sometimes I can stretch her til 9am but she will nap til about 10 in most cases, regardless of when she fell asleep. She then sleeps from about 1-2:30. By 6pm she’s wrecked and I can just about get her to stay awake til 6:30pm when she’s out for the count.

I feel like I’ve tried everything but I’d love her to go to bed a bit later (7/7:30) and wake a bit later (we’d be happy with 6/6:30!)

Anything I haven’t thought of, or is this just her pattern and we have to get used to it? It means her dinner is really early (4:30/5) when we’d rather she ate with us about 6, and we are zombies in the morning..

Couple of things:

• How old is she?
• Can she self settle to sleep?
• What does she sleep in (sleeping bag/blanket/duvet etc)

hard to advise without knowing these 🙂

Otherwise my first thought would be that it’s the coldest part of the night (even in the current tropical temperatures!) so she may be waking for that reason, then be unable to settle back to sleep as she’s quite well rested. She may also be uncomfortable in a wet nappy by that point (if she’s in nappies)?

Depending on her age, you might need a shorter morning nap, plus the lunch naps, and a short afternoon nap to tide her over to bedtime.

We used an app called little ones (not free but we reckon it was worth it!) which helped us navigate self settling and the nap changes etc as DS got older. Started at 12 weeks when I was basically a zombie….life changing. Same info as in lots of books etc but I found it easier to navigate!

My LO similarly often wakes early..but first thing you should try is to stop the early nap as it reinforces early morning waking. So don't give any opportunity to nap -ie no car journeys or buggy-for a few days-to reset baby. Aim for nap 12-2 and then bed time by 7. If baby really can't last until 12, then try for 11, but each day push it later. Hopefully it should make a difference but can take a couple of weeks.