baby not tired at night wakings

[shaylid]

Hi
This is odd.... a couple of nights ago heard my 11.5 week old bub wake up at 4:00 and was talking and laughing with himself until 4:30 when he cried to be settled back to sleep.
last night he woke at 3:30am, cried to be settled, managed to settle after 5 minutes, he woke up 40 min later (which is always the case when he wakes up not hungry), came in calmed him down - he didn't seem like he was getting drowsy, so let him be in his cot, and heard him talk and coo to himself for another 30 minutes before called out for me at which point i fed him - i wonder how hungry he really was because after the feed he started suckling for the sake of it, which he never did before (preparing for the growth spurt??). put him to sleep and he woke 10 minutes before regular time. If he was getting enough sleep during day time i would have thought that he may be getting too much sleep but we are having nap issues and i can barely get 3.5-4 hours of combined nap time.
any ideas?
I mean i don't mind that he is happy just chatting away to himself but why at night time? and i know that eventually he will call for me (i know he doesn't actually care if it is me or someone else but i like to think so.... ).
another change is that up to now when he woke at night it was reswaddle + dummy and off we go until he was hungry but now he will take the dummy only after i pick him up (you can already see he is going to play me on his tinny little finger  ). still he is still pretty o.k to settle and i always put him back down drowsy but awake or awake but calm.
L.

[Tweakster]

Hi there, usually waking happy in the night is a sign of needing more A time - can you post your routine so we can all have a look.

[shaylid]

Hi
had a good night - only 1 waking at 4:30 for feed, although i think i didn;t actually wait and see if he was really hungry (out of excitement).

basically i start the day at 7:00am (if we had a "good night" i.e - one waking for feed he will be waiting happily for me to come and give me a big smile. how fun is it to start the day like that). E usually takes no more than 15-20 minutes, even less in mornings because he is not too hungry after he a 4:30-5:00am feed. last week i worked on extending A (including feed of course) time to 1:05-1:15 (he can handle longer times earlier in the day), from yesterday i started working on an 1:10-1:20.
Then the rest for S.
so
7:00 E
A until 8:15
S until 10:00
and so on....

 we have been having nap issues over the past 3 weeks. at the moment after an intensive week of S2W we are getting around 2 naps of 1:30 - 1:50 and 1 nap of 45 minutes (usually the morning one). with this one we usually end up either in my hands walking around the house for low key activity until feed time (he hadn't woken up hungry for a very very long time) and 1 nap of 30 minutes (usually the evening one) which we usually struggle for most of the remaining nap time - because he will go down for 10 minutes and startle himself up - this can go on multiple times, probably OT. eventually he would fall asleep at 20 minutes to end of nap time and stay asleep. at which point i have to admit i will give him another 20 minutes to at least complete a cycle because I don't want him to be OT for bed time. so evening feed would be around 7:15-7:20 and in bed by 20:30, at which point he (hope i am not jinksing this) will settle reasonably quickly and sleep well until night feed. I also noticed that over the last week at the night feed, instead of him dosing off on the breast and me pulling him back to semi - consciousness, he actually finishes the meal quite alert. I put him back to bed in awake state and leave so i don't know how long it takes him to fall back to sleep.

I was thinking the physiologically (tummy wise) he could probably move to a 3.5 hour routine but mentally he is not there yet given that he is having difficulties handling 1:20 of A. maybe in a couple of weeks...

what do you think?