8 month old awake at 4 am...

[NoPainNoGain]

Please advise.. My 8 month old is awake and raring to go at 4am and DH and I are completely exhausted. Any ideas of why she does this and how we can prevent it welcome.

DD has never really slept much and is easily roused. She now sleeps in her own room and this has already led to some improvement, but 4 am..!! Normally she has 2 naps of around 1 hour each and is in bed by 7pm at the latest, 6 pm if she gets her way!

She eats very well and is very healthy, but DH and I are at crisis point. please help.

6pm is a very early bedtime for some dcs.

I know she prob can't manage to stay awake much later because she's up so early but 6pm to 4am is 10 hours sleep which is prob all she needs in one go.

Any chance of squeezing her bedtime to nearer 8pm so she may get her 10 hours 8pm to 6am?

My youngest was always a very early riser and tbh nothing we did seemed to make any difference. Except us going to bed at 8pm so we felt able to wake at 4.30am!

She grew out of it by the time she was about 18 months.

Hi gagarin, you´re right, dd just can´t stay awake longer than 6pm some days, the problem is i just can´t get her to sleep v long in the daytime, and even if she does sleep often has to be woken up to bring/collect her sister from school.

Any tips on her to cope? As my eldest goest to bed after 7pm it´s not really feasible for us to go to bed at 8pm.. did u not manage to move sleeping period to a more reasonable time?

Thanks for getting back to me.

Well not really .

But I think the thing about picking up from school also was a prob for us. So you have the summer holidays looming so she will be able to have a longer sleep around 3-4pm?

Perhaps that will push bedtime back a bit, esp as I expect your dd1 will have a later bedtime in the school hols so thay can stay up together and play (or more likely fight!)

Good luck for tonight.

ps we did black out curtains/coming into our bed/breastfeeding and nothing worked. We used to stagger downstairs and grab some petit filou and feed them to her in our bed (!) and then crash out either side of this rabbitting baby who sat up and played with her toys between us.

My sympathies- our 7.5 ds is starting to wake at 5 nd it's getting earlier so I know the pain you're in....
One possibility according to some sleep books would be that she's overtired- they say at this age 3 hours of nap time a day is ideal, maybe 2 not enough. I know it's counter- intuitive but perhaps you could try rearranging her naps so she either has one extra or more time at both, inserting the extra time or nap later in the day so she can get to 7 or 7.30pm before bedtime.
The other thing a friend of mine did with success (moved her ds from 5am to 6 at least!) came from the Baby Whisperer (I think)- you need to encourage baby not to see the first nap as part of her nighttime sleep, and so put her down for her first nap later. I don't know when she currently goes back to sleep after her 4am start, but if it were, say 8, try 9, etc May not be helpful depending on when she currently naps.
Good luck, 4am is no fun, not even got GMTV for company ;)

oh and I forgot apparently you have to try something for 5 nights before it can be deemed a success/ failure...

Thanks Ladypanda, really good point re the 5 nights trial thing.. had forgotten that!

Was aware that being overtired could be a reason.. but dd just doesn´t want to sleep! : ( After a 4am start this week she had her first nap at after 9 am : (

In fact things have got worse since I last posted, woke at 2am last night thought then settled till 3am before waking again. I´m thinking of seeing a doctor and reading sleep manuals.

Does approaching new developmental stage lead to sleeping problems? She is definitely about to start crawling and has just learned to sit up from stomach position.. ??

Awful isn´t it, hope you´re not too exhausted!

Yes yes yes it does that's IT! Mine is exactly the same, has just learned how to spin full circle on his tummy, I remember friends going through this- they do stuff like sit up and can't get back down again. And allegedly, it passes, quite quickly.

When we were in the 7th circle of hell around month 5 we read Richard Furber book on sleep- it goes in and out of fashion but definitely worked for us.
Til then, can you and your DH do shifts? That's how I'm saying sane x

Hi there. A month or so ago my dd was waking up around 4-5am and it was driving me nuts too! Someone suggested I try blackout blinds and I thought, it can't be that simple. But it did seem to do the trick. I think the first night it worked perfectly. Then the next few night she woke at other random times instead like midnight or 2am. But after about a week she settled down and started to sleep 7 through to at least 6am, sometimes 7am!! A miracle as far as I was concerned. So I would say it's definitely worth a try if you don't have them already. I didn't buy proper blackout blinds, just improvised with some thick dark fabric I had already.

Thanks all! DD now sleeping again - and can now crawl!

Another reason I came across for not sleeping is commercial baby food! Apparantly it is just not calorific enough or contain enough fat to keep baby satisfied. Anyone know anymore than that?

Oh brilliant!! Well done baby, hope you're having more rest. Presumably crawling during the day makes them more tired = better and longer nght sleeping. It's a beautiful world.
Never heard that about babyfood- my DS eats 3 2 course meals a day of home-cooked organic full fat loveliness but is still waking at 5!