7 month old wakes at 5am every day

[Natpat81]

Hello

Looking for any other suggestions I can try. DS is 7.5 months and for the past 2 months has woken every day at 5am ish. She is clearly still tired then as she will go back to sleep but only on me - she won’t go back in her cot. Was hoping it was a phase but I’ve been getting up at 5am and holding her while she sleeps for 2 months now with no improvement. My husband gets up at 6.30am and takes her while I go back to bed for an hour before he works. (Makes more sense for us this way round as I can usually go back to sleep whereas if my husband got up at 5am he isn’t able to nap). We have already brought our own bedtime forward an hour to cope with less sleep. If I didn’t hand her over at 6.30am she would stay asleep on me for longer - maybe until 7/7.30. But she wakes up when we do the hand over.

Bedtime is 7pm and she goes down straight away. She wakes up 1/2 times in the night before the 5am wake up and I BF her and she goes back down easily.

We’ve been on holiday for the past 2 weeks and so tried some later bed times - even putting her to bed at 8.30pm she was still waking at 5.

I’ve tried bringing her into bed with us at 5 but she screams and kicks/punches/flails around so none of us can get any sleep that way. So I just sit on a chair in a dark room holding her so at least 2 out of 3 of us get sleep.

I’ve considered getting up at 5am and starting our day then but then she’d need an additional nap and nap times are already stressful and she fights and screams before every one, and then only sleeps for 30 mins so not something I fancy doing at 7.30am.

I don’t have a routine for naps since it’s hard enough work to get her to nap, and sometimes it will take 30mins for her to fall asleep and sometimes 5. I just watch for her tired cues. I would say an average day would be 3x30min naps, but sometimes she will have a longer after lunch nap in the pram for 2.5 hours in which case she will just have the one 30min morning nap as well. There is no difference in wake up time whether she has more nap time during the day or not.

I try not to have her nap after 4pm but sometimes (eg if she wakes up at 2.00 from a nap) I add a 4.30-5.00 nap in. She always goes to sleep straight away at bedtime so this nap doesn’t seem to be a problem, and she still wakes at 5am.

Any other suggestions I can try? I should also add that whilst I am trying to wean her she barely eats anything so can’t try any food related suggestions.

Many thanks

My 4yo still does the same. I think just lean into it and assume you'll never sleep again.

It’s simple, sleep train her. Job done

Some kids just wake at 5, it’s a fairly normal time for them. I’m not really sure what you can do about it. My toddlers wake up time has always been 7am, my babies is 6am so I now wake an hour earlier than I used to, it is what it is.

Move her bedtime an hour later, or two even if you want her to sleep till 7.

If you think this is impossible / won't work, I'm curious what will happen with the change in clocks coming up.

If you manage to get her into a new routine when the clocks go forward then it's totally possible.

FWIW, people are weirdly strange about DC going down by 7 in this country, it's not the same in other countries.

Honestly it is what it is . She will outgrow it at some point . My 3 year old has odd days where he wakes up early too but the difference is he is old enough to know he has to stay in bed

@Wenttomowameadow oh no! This is not a happy outcome!

@mumofboys8787 is there any way of sleep training you’d suggest? I thought it was mainly aimed at getting babies to sleep at night time and she falls asleep straight away then. I looked into it a lot for naps and tried some of the techniques but can’t say anything worked - she still screams before every single nap (even contact nap).