Up at 4Am?

Hello, I understand your problem...one thing that worked for me was to get my daughter on a very set schedule. Here is what I did with her and it took a week or so to get her adjusted, now we do not have any problems.

6:30am Wake up
7am Breakfast
8:30 1 hour nap, no longer
9am snack
12:30 2 hour nap
3pm snack
5-6pm dinner
After dinner playtime, bath, book, brush teeth
7:30pm bedtime

When she was waking up early I did not go into her room and pick her up...I would sneak up and just make sure she was ok. At first she would cry for about 20 min but eventually she would fall back asleep. Now if she does wake up she knows how to put herself back to sleep.

Her caregiver will need to follow the schedule and make sure she gets her naps in...keeping her up later is not going to make her sleep longer, it will just make her more fussy. Babies need there naps and should be taking a 2-3 hour nap during the day.

That is my advice...hopefully you can work it out.

Our pediatrician explained to us when we were going through a similar experience that children have sleep "cycles" every night. Each cycle is around 4 hours long comprising of several stages within the cycle. If she is waking at 4a.m., that may be the end of one of her sleep cycles and she is "recharged". She needs to learn how to comfort herself and go into the next sleep cycle which will end around morning time. We were told not to go in to the bedroom between sleep cycles and to let the child try to soothe himself. You said before that you don't believe in crying it out and I'm not sure if you still don't believe in it but it sounds like this "waking at night" is becoming quite difficult for you. You just want to make sure that you do not get into a bad pattern of not allowing her to learn to comfort and soothe herself. It is our nature as mother's to want to be able to soothe our children forever but eventually they have to learn self-comforting measures on their own. My oldest son wakes almost every night at 2 a.m. and has for about 5 years now. Sometimes he goes right back to sleep and sometimes he comes to get me. It is exhausting for me because I end up being the one who can't get back to sleep! I wish I was stricter about the middle of the night waking when he was an infant/toddler and maybe we would all get more sleep!

Hi J.,

I don't know if it's normal, but my 11 month-old doesn't sleep through the night either. I usally have to give him a bottle once or twice during the night. He eats constantly it seems, but he wakes up hungry during the night. I'm not really sure what to do either.

Since we're also co-sleeping it can be rather disruptive to me and my partner, but we both seem to take it in stride. We're tired all the time, but we've accepted this as our lot in life (at least for the time being).

Thanks for posting this.

M.

My son did this when he was about that age.He would wake up around 4 or 430 and cry. I went in one time to try to get him back to sleep, and that was a mistake. The next month he was up every night. The only way I figured out how to fix it was to just let him cry. You're his mom so you know the difference in his cries. If my son would happen to wake up with a paniced cry I would go get him and calm him down, but never take him out of his room or away from his bed, and as soon as he was calmed down I would put him back in bed and walk away. Of course he would start crying when I put him down, but I would look at the clock and I gave him 5 minutes to stop crying. I still haven't had to get up a second time. (The longest he made it was 4 minutes) If he's not paniced, and he just happened to wake up then I let him cry. It's extremely hard to do, but I set a rule that if the number on the clock started with an F (four or five) I wasn't getting up. He rarely cries for more than a couple of minutes until he falls back to sleep. I found it worked, but it was painful to do because I wanted to go get him so bad, but now I don't have any problems.

Hope this helped.

With all my kids if they woke up i'd go in there and give them a toy or a drink of water in a sippy cup and than leave.They learned to put themselves back to sleep.Yeah it was hard but they learned they stay in bed until 700am(for the younger 2)and 630am for my oldest.
And of yeah,my kids don't sleep in one weekends either,we have tried to let them snuggle with us but they are ready to go by 630-700am and it doesn't matter how late we keep them up,they still get up early.
Sorry no real help.(But one bad thing we did with dennis is let him venture in our room and that helped some with getting sleep but he'd take up the whole bed)and he doesn't really want in our room unless he's a sick baby

It may sound counterintuitive, but I would try putting her to bed a little earlier. When my son was waking up at the crack of dawn (or before), I started putting him down a little earlier, this started when he was about 10 months old. He now sleeps from 7pm - 7am with one nap mid-day that lasts anywhere from 90 minutes to 3 hours. If he wakes up in the middle of the night, I try to let him fall back to sleep without going in too soon. Usually, he's back to sleep in 10 minutes. Also, check with the caregiver about the amount of "exercise" she gets during the day, both mental and physical. This has been key in getting my son to sleep through the night. Days when we're lazy he has a harder time staying asleep. I didn't see your previous question, so I'm not sure what was recommended in getting your daughter to sleep through the night, but I hope that what worked for me can be of some help to you!