Hi all
Very new here, I have a 12 month old darling boy who used to sleep wonderfully (thought we had it made when he was tiny - he slept through from 3 months
) but then he hit the 9 month sleep regression and from then on it has generally gone from bad to worse. He has woken no later than 4.30am for the last week and this morning it was 3.45am (we did WI/WO for an hour when he finally went back to sleep for an hour - I on the other hand just lay there waiting for him to wake so have been on the go for a while
).
He (usually) wakes around 5/5.30 and is BF almost straight away - he screams the house down until he gets this!
We go downstairs and he has breakfast
10is he has a nap and then he has a beaker of milk
12pm lunch
2.30is 2nd nap followed by beaker of milk
5.30pm teatime
7pm bf then bath, book and bed - he has been soothing himself off for 7.30pm the last few days, but sometimes he needs his back patted/rubbed for a few minutes until he goes off.
Naps vary from 30/40 mins to 1.5/2 hours depending on what he feels like!
He is generally a happy little soul through the day and I am resigned to early wakings, but 3.45 is a bit much! I plan to put a post on toddler sleep and see if I get any advice - in the meantime I'll pop the matchsticks in!
He has only had the one nap so far today (he doesn't see to want the afternoon one) so I'll see what happens tonight. I'm wondering if he is ready to drop the 2nd nap, but I'm not sure how to do this as I work 3 days a week and he does to the childminder. She is near to where I work which is half an hour from home so he often has a snooze on the way there which would scupper things a bit
. Any ideas?
On a different note (don't know if this has been suggested before) I found some research on the Internet which had shown that early waking adult insomniacs who were given the use of a UV light box half an hour of so before bed ended up no longer having insomnia. Having thought about this I decided to try taking Cameron for a walk each evening before bed (in the summer obviously) to see if this would help. When I did it when he was 10 months old it worked like a charm - we had 6.30am wake ups for a few weeks - but then he got sick and it all went out the window. We still go for our walk, but the magic seems to have gone! However you may want to try it to see if it works! If you can't get out for the walk I guess 30 mins or so playing in the garden would have the same effect - it's all to do with UV light.