17 month EW - advice needed

[*Becky*]

I think i would try some meds - if it makes no difference then you know it is not that but it does sound like it could be.
18 months was when we finally managed to get ds to a 7.15/30pm bedtime and he had always been a lo who went to bed early. We managed it by getting a good 2 hour nap out of him one day which meant he could handle a longer A time. Once he had done this for a few days it seemed to set.
I think if he does an 11 hour night then you could push the day forward a bit as it is still a good nights sleep and he should be feeling ok although he would need to take a slightly longer nap.
If his naps have been about 1.15 that also makes me think teeth as that is the nap length we always get with teeth issues.
bx

[thomassm]

hi there just wanted to reply to say I know how your feeling. My DS is 16 months old and has always been an EW 5.30 every morning, he goes to bed at 7am and more often than not doesn't wake in the night unless teething (we now got 16 only 4 more left yey)

I've tried most things the only thing I haven't tried is w2s because I've been bit selfish and rather have that extra hours sleep haha!!

Might give it a go tonight though x

[merrion_feb]

Oh ladies - right back to where we started. Woke before 6 yesterday morning and at 5.20 this morning. Bedtime still at 7PM.

Surely this is not overtiredness - no sign of teething over the weekend so don't think its that either.

He fell asleep in my arms at 6.45 this morning and slept till 8.15 so I know he wasn't ready to wake at that time.

I'm at the end of my tether now - I feel like I am not doing my best by him. Is there anything else I can try.

I read in one of the forums that at 18 months (he isn't 18 months until next weekend) that activity increases alot. Currently he is doing 5.5 in the morning and 6 in the evening. I can't control the morning A time as he is in nursery but would increasing PM A time help or am I just going to make the OT worse.

[*Becky*]

No personally I would not increase the pm A time on those naps, 6 hours is plenty. You could try letting him nap for more like 2.5 hours and then doing a later bedtime, that might work.

[merrion_feb]

Thanks Henry - as mentioned already I don't have control over the naps as he attends nursery. Even at home he has never napped 2.5 hours in his life

[*Becky*]

no my lo has not either much to my dismay! Sorry, forgot about nursery...
how do you deal with the early mornings? Do you try and get him back to sleep or do you start the day?

[*Becky*]

going to get some more eyes on this for you x

[babybarr]

I think with a nap of only 1hr 15 mins or so you need to do early bedtime to keep OT at bay.  We have a notorious 1hr 15min napper here too.  Something that has helped us is a slightly earlier nap so if there is anyway nursery are able to do that it's worth a shot - or at weekends at least.

So something like
wake 5.30am (just for ease!)
nap 11-11.15am hopefully he'll do a 1.5hr nap and get you to 12.45pm
bed no later than 6.30pm

I know it's not ideal but if he then sleeps till 5.30am on a regular basis that's an 11hr night and then we can try and push your day back.

HTH

[Tweakster]

Hi there, agree with Laura.  If he's not doing a long nap then he will get OT with a day that is too long.  Activity increases but they need the sleep for stamina.  So if they don't do a long night and don't do a long nap then their sleep totals fall below average in a 24 hour period and for most that means an OT kid.   

Our long story short, Finn is 16 mths and we had EW until about 2 mths ago.  Now we occasionally get them but not as often, and usually with a bit of tweaking we can get him to 6 a.m.  Nothing later I'm afraid. The only thing that has really changed is all his teeth came in (just waiting on 2 yr molars).  So I do believe there is some truth to the teeth causing a lot of sleep havoc.  He would be rested enough at that 10 hour mark to be annoyed by the pain and just not go back to sleep.  Now we know that he's actually capable of doing 11 hrs.  But it took us nearly 16 mths to get to this point.  He's just an early riser period, nothing we do can change that I think.  So we have to build the best routine that will work for him, even if it doesn't work that well for us :-(

I think if you follow what Laura has posted, then we can start to push his day back.  We ended up at a 7:30 bedtime for a while which gave us a 6 a.m. wake up.  Now we got some bedtime resistance in the past 2 weeks so we have had to cut our nap to maintain bedtime.  Now that his nap is slightly cut he's ready to do a longer night.  But every LO is different.  Seems your LO prefers his night sleep to his nap so you need to give him a longer night in bed if you know he's not going to pull of a long nap.

One thing that may throw things of is if you put him back down again too soon after the EW, he is not inclined to extend his night sleep and also, he may see that as his a nap rather than part of his night sleep.  So he is also not inclined to give a longer nap either.

I know it's hard, Finn is in daycare and we have little control there too.  Our day was front-loaded so he would do a really long morning A 6-7 hrs some days and then a much shorter A to bedtime, sometimes we had to cut as far back as 4.5 hrs.  Now he's doing well with a 6 hr morning A, 2 hr nap and then no more than 5.5 to bedtime. 

[merrion_feb]

Hi ladies thanks for all the advice - so I should be looking at an 11 hour night minimum?

In that case I think 6 hour A in the evening max and get him to bed early. And hope that at least he sleeps for the 11 hours and wakes at 6AM.

If more than 6 hours "A" time is too much for him not sure how it would be possible to push his day back. He usually wakes from his nap at 1.15 and is in bed for 7. Unless the nap magicly extends at this stage I think we are stuck with the 7 PM bed time.

[babybarr]

I think at this point you need to get him over being OT and you'll probably need to do early bt as you don't seem to get a longer nap.  Once he is doing say a 6.30pm-5.30am STTN every night we'll start pushing the nap and bt back in 10min increments.