Ok, I'm jumping in on this thread in hopes that someone will be able to point us in the right direction....as we must eliminate this 5 am wakeup!!!!!!!!
Hopefully this won't be too long of an explanation, but here goes...
DS started sleeping through in October, but has always had a 5 am wakeup. He is very very scrawny for his age (just under 16 lbs at 9 1/2 mos) - so I've always been happy and willing to give him that 5 am feed. We were in a pretty good routine before the holidays of feeding at 5 then he'd sleep for 1 1/2 to 2 more hours. All was well.
Well, over the holidays with travel and everything that wakeup started creeping back little by little and he was up at 4:30, then 4, then 3:30...things were spiralling out of control!!! At his 9 mo checkup, I told his doc about this, and she said that he didn't need the 5 am feeding, despite the fact that she wants him to put on weight pronto. She suggested a bottle of water (I knew he'd never go for that, as he's never taken to a bottle no matter what's in it), or letting him cry, or doing whatever to get him to go back to sleep without the feed.
So we set out with having dh go in and soothe him to sleep. We eliminated the feed, but it's been over a week now and he's still waking up (with the exception of one night, where he slept 8 pm to 6 am hours without a peep - I thought I'd won the lottery!!). For a few of the nights he's put himself back to sleep with a whimper here and there, but most of the nights - or I guess I should say mornings - it's full-out crying pretty quickly.
So here's the dilemma...do I try wake to sleep, or do I try moving his 3 naps to 2 - which, btw are not necessarily a sufficient amount of sleep as we've been plagued by the 30 minute nap problem which I've been trying (with little success) to fix.
I would be more than willing to start the day at 5 am if he were well rested, but he's miserable. And dh has to get up at 6 for work, so if we could even just make it that extra hour that would work too. I have problems with 'night wakings' myself, so right now I feel like I need to be in bed by about 6 pm in order to get 8 decent hours myself!!!!!!!!!!
At the moment, with 2 naps of about 80 mins each (but rarely straight through - I often have to help him go back to sleep part way through) and a cat nap at about 4:30 pm, he can barely keep his head up past 7:30. I know in general he's just not getting enough sleep, but I just don't know what to do for him (and us).
Thanks for reading......any insight we could get would be wonderful!
Deborah