Help me sort this out

[LaTurkey]

My dd is 11.5 months old. She started sleeping reasonably well only. She was sleeping 7 until 5 uninterrupted - which was fine by me.

For the last two weeks she has been waking up at 4am. I take her into bed for a bf for as long as she will stay on the breast and then up. She is absolutely raring to go, though not particularly hungry.

She is then exhausted by 9 am and will have a two hour nap. She will usually have an afternoon nap too of 45-90 minutes, though sometimes not.

If I try and get her back to bed at 4ish it never works: she just cries and cries in whatever way we try.

She is a very active baby though not walking or crawling yet. She is teething periodically but I don't think this is the reason for her early waking. I think she just wants to play!

How can I encourage her to attach some of this nap sleep onto the nighttime sleep?

I may try a dream feed tonight.

Oh .. and it makes no difference if she misses her afternoon nap at all.

What I think would be ideal is a mid-morning nap, say 11am until 1pm. However, she is just zonked by 9am and I haven't had the heart to keep her awake yet - even if I could.

She is probably about to start crawling or go straight to walking. It really mucks their sleep up.

oh gracious, you poor things. You must be beside yourselves with knackeration!

I have no idea what to suggest but I do know for a fact that this won't last forever. My LO was waking at 5am for a few weeks and now seems to consistently be sleeping from 7pm to 8am .

Bumping incase anyone else can help.

Oh yes - I have just remembered - you can try the rousing her to sleep technique whereby you rouse her gently awake at 3ish in your case but not to wide awake, just to stirring and then that can break the cycle and she'll go back off to sleep again and hopefully until after 4!!!

Thanks for your replies. I didn't see them yesterday.

She keeps trying to pull herself up, so I thikn it may be development in part, ches.

Spankyou - I've heard of that technique but I can't bring myself to do it - yet. DH and I take it in turns to get up so I'm not that bad. It's much better than it used to be - until 10 months she was waking 3 times a night and geting up at 5.30!

I cut her naps down yesterday and she slept for about 40 minutes more. The way to go?

I didn't try the dreamfeed yet.