11.5 month waking earlier and earlier

[jkitiara]

These forums have helped me so much in the past! I'm glad you're all here. I'm hoping you can help me again.

Sleep went all crazy at around 10 months. I read the sections here about "10/11 month sleep gone wonky" and tried some things but nothing seems to help. The worst issue that his morning wake up is getting earlier and earlier. It abruptly went from 6:30 to 5:30 and now that I've finally resigned myself to that, it's moved to 5am! He wakes up pretty happy and awake. Fades fast, often rubbing his eyes by 7.

The second big issue is that he refuses to nap in his crib for the second nap. We do PU/PD and he will fight forever and not nap. I've been doing second nap in a carrier. I tried to just move to one nap because I thought maybe it was time and everything got worse! Exhausted baby, multiple night wakings. Ugh.

Current EASY Schedule
5am wake and eat bottle
6am eat solids
9:30 nap in crib
10:30 wake and eat bottle
12 eat solids
2pm bottle
second nap anywhere between 2:30-4 if he fights really hard. About 1 hr long
6:30 bottle
7/7:30pm sleep

It didn't seem to matter if I put him down at 6:45 or 8pm. He will wake up at 5:30 on the dot.

We went through a bad time a few weeks ago where he was waking up and staying awake for an hour at 2am, but we seem to be over that and he's sleeping through the night again.

[ginger428]

HI there!
It could be the start of the 2-1 nap drop.  I know, it seems so early but we began around this age and it lasted several months before switching completely to one nap.
Have you read this yet?
Tell us what you think...

https://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=163278.0

[jkitiara]

Yep, I read all of this. We started shortening his morning nap to 1 hr. instead of 1.5 based on this. His afternoon nap is only 45 min, if it happens at all. Nothing changed once I started doing this.

I also pushed his morning nap back farther to 10am for about 2 weeks. This just made the afternoon nap even more of a struggle so we shifted back to 9/9:30.

[ginger428]

Our DS went through a looong transition to 1 nap with crazy changes, too.

Apologies, I missed the part where you said you tried 1 nap.  Perhaps he's somewhere in between. At one point, we were at a 10:00ish-10:30 nap time, and a catnap of 20 mins around 3. Our routine shifted many times over several months. Remind me again if you've tried a really short catnap in the late afternoon?

[jkitiara]

No, I've never tried a super short catnap. Currently it's about 1 hr/1 hr. For a while he was doing a super duper long morning one of 2-2.5, but then a second nap wouldn't happen at all.

I've given in and do most afternoon naps in the carrier so they are happening more often. Do you think 1 hr/30 min might push him to sleep longer?

[ginger428]

Yes, I think a shortening of the second nap, a means to phase it out, might help. Usually in this case, you want to preserve the first nap at whatever length he'll take... so don't cap that one bc it could cause OT if we did. We're trying to balance a few things- total daytime sleep, awake times between sleep times, and total hrs awake, all in order to get decent overnight sleep. Lots of trial and error to get the perfect recipe as you are aware! 

Not sure when you started the pm nap in any of these instances, but a this age and stage, I would only try the pm nap after 4.5 hrs or so. Then BT 3-3.5 hrs after.

Something like:
WU 5:45/6:00 (hopefully!)
NAP1 9:45-11
NAP2 3:30-4:00
BT 7:30

[Margarita90]

Maybe this will help you:
My child started to fight with second nap as well around 11-12m so from two naps of 1,5 we cut them to 1,5 and 1h but still was sth wrong. When he went to nursery after 12m they gave him cat nap (15min) sometimes in morning and then from 12:00 normal sleep (around 2 - 2,5h ). But with other children he don't use this cat nap anymore now - 14m. So is just nap around 12 . It's really working. So good luck!:)