Early waking doing me in! Help please!

[BBaby]

Ok, so here's another 'issue' that someone may have some useful advice on. Nathaniel has been waking between 5.30 and 6am and not going back to sleep. He usually starts off making some chatty noises but if I leave him it progressively gets worse until he's crying about half an hour later. If I feed him he takes a feed but then he usually wont go back to sleep either so that's it - he's up for the day. It's driving me crazy as I'm sooooo tired, and so is he - he's yawning all day.

It would be hard to keep him up later as he's knackered by 6.45pm despite having a 20/30 min nap between 4 and 5pm.

Do you think I should cut this late nap out completely? His other naps are erratic and can be anything between 30 to 90 minutes with usually one at 9ish and one at 12ish. I have to take him for a walk for the late nap so if we stayed in he wouldn't go to sleep. I'm just scared that he would be overtired and go to sleep earlier than 7pm or be difficult to settle.

HELP!!

Oh, and although I think this is awful when I look in my diary it's only been for the past 5/6 nights (although before that he never really made it to 7 - more like 6.20/6.30) so perhaps it's a phase? And he has a large dream feed at 11pm - taking 6oz of EBM at the moment when I had been trying to cut it down.

Thanks

BBx

how old is he?

5.5 months.

Hi BBaby - my DS is 3.5 months and was waking at 4-5am and I was sure he could sleep through (as he was never hungry at 7am). We follow GF and in her book she recommended, for babies waking early, to make the 10/11pm feed an hour long one instead of a quick feed. This is what we do:

• wake at 10pm and give 10-15 mins to wake fully - turn on lights and take out of bedding/sleeping bag
• feed as much breast or bottle as they want
• change nappy
• play/chat with them until 10.50
• try and feed some more bottle or breast in the dark to settle back to sleep so in bed for 11pm

I don't know if you like or follow GF but it may be worth a try as since implementing this our DS hasn't woken till 5.30am - 7am so a definite improvement.

Good luck with whatever you do!

Just wanted to add - if you do this and it works - once he is sleeping to 7 for 2/3 weeks you can start to cut the feed time down by 5 mins every few days till its a dream feed again.

This nightfeed is really short now and I'm not even sure that baby is awake for most of it as he falls asleep and still eats. Hubby does it and is really tired but I'll see if he can make it a bit longer by doing it earlier and changing his nappy or something.

Thanks

BBx