Early morning wake-up at 6.5 months

[javeitch]

Hi there,

Firstly, thank you for a wonderful resource!

My son is 6.5 months old and since starting him on solids at 5 months, he has started waking up at night. In the last 3 days he has woken up at 4h00-4h30 and it is virtually impossible to get him back to sleep. If we do manage to get him to sleep eventually, it is only for 45 minutes. He generally wakes up crying, but does not seem to be hungry (he has a particular hungry cry). We try to sh him and hold his arms and legs until he has settled. This seems to work and I go back to bed, but within a few minutes he starts crying again. My husband is usually the one who succeeds in actually getting him to sleep (with a very loud shh) after about an hour and a half of both of us trying. Sometimes he doesn't manage to get back to sleep and is awake until his 7h00 feed.

This is the 4 hour EASY routine we aim to achieve:

07h00            E (breast)
                      A
09h00-11h00 S
11h00            E (bottle with breastmilk followed by 50-100 ml fruit)
                      A
13h00-15h00 S
15h00            E (bottle with breast-milk followed by 50-100 ml vegetables)
                      A
17h00-           S
17h00/18h00
18h00/18h30 E (breast)
                      A (bath and wind-down)
19h00/19h30  E (he gets wound-up after a bath, so we give him a feed to settle)
20h00             BT
22h30             DF

We don't achieve this routine because:
- he wakes up between 06h00 and 06h30 (and sometimes even 04h00/04h30!), instead of 07h00
- he can generally only manage a 1.5 hour nap in the morning and midday. We help him with this nap by doing wake to sleep after 20 minutes.

It ends up being more like: AEASAEAS etc...

Note:
- We always keep mealtimes at the same times, even though we are not able to stick to the rest of the schedule
- Even though we have started on solids, we are still giving him all his milk feeds as before
- This routine was working pretty well for us before we started on solids (i.e. he slept through the night quite well)
- In the last week he has moved from his crib to his cot
- His limit on A time seems to be 2-2.5 hours

In order to stop the ~04h00 wake-up (when it is almost impossible to put him back to sleep) do we:
- give him less sleep during the day?
- give him more food during the day?
- fix our routine somehow?
- give him a later dream feed?
- wake him for his dream feed?
- something else?

Thanks in advance,
Jen

[javeitch]

Thank you Jane, we will try to extend his A time to 3 hours and see what happens. I have a question on how we then manage his schedule. If the A time increases, surely the S time should decrease otherwise his bedtime would end up being very late (if we just shifted the schedule to give him longer A times)?

Cheers,
Jen
x

[snowbird]

Hi Jen,

Could you post your actual EASY rather than your ideal so we can see what your day looks like. Will enable us to help you more.

Xx

[javeitch]

Thank you everybody for your posts. We are having some success with extending his A time to 3 hours, but he still seems to need his catnap as he gets quite cranky without it.

He is waking now earlier in the morning, usually twice or three times, between midnight and 3 am. Today his first tooth erupted, so that may explain a lot!

This is our typical routine:

6:30am - wake
7:00am - feed
~8:30-10:00am - 1.5h sleep
11:00am - feed
~12:30pm - 2pm - 1.5h sleep
3:00pm - feed
~5:00pm - 37min sleep
6:30pm - feed
7:00pm - bath
7:30pm - feed
8:00pm - sleep
10:30pm - dream feed

His normal sleep cycle is 37min and we have to put him back to sleep to get his 1.5h sleeps. He wakes an hour before feed time and we cannot move that back as he is tired an hour and a half before that...

Thanks!