ok, things are getting riduculous int he tutterhole -- please come and tell me what you'd do...

[Tutter]

ds2 (nearly 11mo) is (just as his brother was) an early morning waker

for months now dh and i have been taking turns getting up at 5ish with him, but - ugh - we can't carry on doing this for much longer

today it was my turn. 4:52am [tired]

we get him up and come downstairs because he is loud and so wakes ds1 if we leave him (their rooms are next to each other)

you can safely assume we have tried all common sense solutions (his room is heavily blacked out, have tried putting him to bed earlier/later, have tried cutting down his daytime sleep)

so - please tell me, would you:

a) accept that early mornings are a feature until he's older (ds1 only slept til later once he was well established without a daytime nap)

b) try cc (gasp) - we could move ds2 to another room - further from ds1 - for this

c) radically cut down on daytime sleep and stick with it for ages (> 1 week?) to be really sure it doesn't help

d) try something else?

I would try cutting out any naps.

When you go into him, is he wide awake ?? If he is just sleepy awake iykwim, you could try taking off whatever you wear on top in beside him and the smell will comfort him and possibly send him back to sleep.

Are you breastfeeding ??

DS does this (though a bit older). We like an easy life, so try bringinh him into bed with us first to see if he'll doze off. Up at 5:30 this morning, but he was asleep most of yesterday as he had a nasty cold.

Do you have blackout blinds? They have really helped here (usual waking time at about 6 rather than 4:30 or 5).

no, have stopped bfing

he's generally sitting up and raring to go

no way would he make it without naps full stop - remember he's up at 5am!

atm he naps at 8:30ish (normally wake him after an hour or so) and after lunch (anything from one to two hours)

if i left him, he'd sleep and sleep in the morning (i mean, during his morning nap) - up to 2 hours

one day last week (we were on holiday so no routine really) he slept from 7:30am til 9:30am, then was awake til bedtime (7pm)

still woke at 5am the next day, but i wonder what would happen if we stuck with that pattern for a few days...?

oh and we did cc with DS for the getting to sleep part at about 15 mo, but I don't think it would work in the mornings. He's just wide awake!

In that case, I would silently give him a small bottle of milk, lay him back down and go back to bed.

I had to do this a few times, and it is hard not to speak to them but it eventually worked, now I have to tell you, we did not get much more than an hour to an hour and half but believe me it was blisssssssssssss.

I wouldn't cut out naps in the day, the better they sleep in the day the better they sleep at night imo.
Does he have a late bottle in the evening?
Could you try an early morning bottle?

we have tried giving him milk

maybe we'll try it again. it would mean leaving him to yell for a couple of minutes while one of us warmed a bottle -- hopefully wouldn't disturb ds1...

I know you have blackout blinds, but is it absolutely pitch black?

we have a blackout blind up, but darkens the room rather than blacks it out. Since putting tin foil up at the windows and blacking it the room out totally, we have brought DD's waking time forward from 5.30 to 6.30-7pm.

Re: the naps. When waking at 5, DD would need a nap about 9ish, otherwise she would be horrid all day. We'd wake her after 15 mins, which gave her enough of a boost to get through to a more normal lunchtime nap and not have too much daytime sleep.

we have blackout blinds plus blackout curtains, but no, it's not absolutely pitch black

worth a go i suppose

he went back down at 7 today as was rubbing his eyes

have left him - he can have a long sleep now and a short nap after lunch

I remember reading something about changing their body clocks when going through this. IIRC you go in an wake them a couple of hours before they would normally wake up, give them an drink and then settle the child back down, the theory is they should then sleep longer. Although we never did this properly we did find that on nights where there was an unscheduled wakening we got more sleep the next morning so it might be worth a try.

Maybe he's hungry?
Do you give him a late feed?
I used to lift my ds at about 11pm and give him a bottle and he'd go thro to 7am, he didn't ever really wake up.

you could try leaving him for as long as he will sleep for his morning nap then cutting out his afternoon nap?

I would try:

Only one nap a day -- if he can't make it through the morning then 5-10 minutes max. DS dropped his morning nap around this age, we found that if he had more than 10 mins in the morning he wouldn't sleep properly after lunch.

Definitely make the room darker -- we too have blackout blinds but have also plugged all the gaps round the edges where light was seeping in.

DS went from 12 to 10-11 hours sleep at night at about 12mo, we now put him to bed at 8pm so the earliest he's up is 6ish which is manageable. On a good day (like this morning) he'll go til 7ish.

Also I don't think cc generally works in the morning. We have tried leaving DS to grizzle for a while and it just escalates -- once he's awake, he's awake.

I would do (a). In fact, we are doing (a).

Oh I sympathise. My dd the same age is also doing this. We put bin bags on the windows to really black it out and it still didn't work. We were feeding her at 5ish when she woke, but then are you making a rod etc etc [sceptica]

[sceptical]

. see too bloody tired !!!

I would do (a) and in fact have been doing a for about five years

I haven't actually tried this as my DD is only 9 weeks but try this video on Andrea Grace's site. (She is a sleep therapist.) here

All mine were early wakers. They always had a stack of books in the corner of their cot and a cup (non leaking type) of water. This never failed to buy us some extra time