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4 month old waking early but not hungry - any suggestions that worked for you?

2 replies

AuntyVi · 18/04/2008 09:17

Hi all, just wondering whether anyone can help with this. Our 4-month-old recently stopped needing any night feeds, but since then he has started waking very early (5.15 this morning..) and keeping us awake from then on, either playing or just restless, but he doesn't cry and doesn't seem hungry (I've been feeding him at his old wake-up time of 7 and even then he doesn't seem particularly starving). My DH keeps insisting we need to keep him up later in the evenings so he sleeps later, but I'm not convinced - he is already going to bed at nearly 8pm, so keeping him up later would be very tough (he does get very tired then) and I doubt it will help; plus lots of people have told ME that if anything he should go to bed earlier to help him sleep, but DH won't believe this! He won't let me try anything else (earlier bedtimes, trying to darken the room more, moving him to his own room in case we are disturbing him) until we have done at least 3 days of late bedtimes, but I think this will be a nightmare and will mess up his routine too.
Has anyone managed to "fix" or at least improve early wakeups with your own LOs around this age, and if so, what worked for you please? At the moment I am half wishing we'd never dropped the night feed, as I was getting more sleep then - he would go back down afterwards most times and then sleep till 7!

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Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
firststeps · 20/04/2008 13:05

what about dong a dream feed 4 hours after his bedtime feed to see if this helps especially if he was going through til 7 after his middle of the night feed? Or maybe he is ready to cut down a little on one of his daytime sleeps or if he still has a late afternoon nap it might be time to drop this?

AuntyVi · 20/04/2008 14:35

Thanks for replying!
I'm already doing a dreamfeed, if anything I've been wondering whether he needs less then as he isn't particularly hungry when he wakes in the morning - even at 7am he still doesn't seem to have that much appetite, never mind earlier.
I don't know if we can shorten or drop the naps at the moment, the trouble is when he wakes so early, he gets more tired during the day so if anything we have to give him extra sleep, it's a bit of a vicious cycle! So far, he seems to sleep slightly longer on the days when he got good naps during the day, than when he didn't nap well and was more tired. So I am wondering whether he actually needs MORE sleep and maybe an earlier bedtime to make him less restless... but not really sure.

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