Hi guys
My baby girl will be 9 months in two weeks and has been waking up very early for many months now. She's been getting 3-3.5hrs of sleep and when her bedtime was 6pm (since she was 4/5 mo), she very gradually started waking up at 5:30, then 5, then 4:30 and we really started freaking out at this point, not knowing what it could be. It seems like it could be all of the current milestones - learning to roll over (this is STILL a huge issue as she doesn't know how to roll onto her back and always gets stuck and needs my help getting back in position and back to sleep (usually nursing, I know.. terrible). She's also been teething since she was 5mo but at nearly 9mo there's no teeth in sight. She's also starting to learn how to crawl. Lately we've been working on pushing bedtime to 6:30 and we've seen some progress.. no more waking at 4:20 but she'll still wake between 4:45-5. This is what the schedule looks like.
4:40/5:00am WU
7:30-9 nap, feed, play
11:30-12:30/1 nap, feed, play (sometimes I just wake her at 12:30 to make time for a CN, unless she's very exhausted and I'll allow a longer 2nd nap plus CN)
3:30-4 cat nap, feed, play
6:15 bath, nurse
6:30 bedtime
We live in a noisy city, near a roundabout and my girl has to sleep with white noise blasting. She frequently rubs her eyes during sleep but before this current leap (which we're a day or two from the end of), she was only waking up twice a night to nurse and everything went downhill once leap 6 started. Its been getting better but she's either being woken up by traffic at night, by noisy neighbors, or just her own milestones/teething/hunger/etc. Anyway, I wonder whether she's getting too much daytime sleep? She struggles to self settle after 3am and usually if I run in fast enough at 4:30 or so, I can rock her back into a sleep but often she'll just stay awake and be incredibly cranky all the way til 7:30 for her first nap. The first nap used to be 7 but in an effort to shift everything a bit later, we figured a later first nap might result in a later WU. Up until now she was very easily falling asleep for naps (which I still hold her for, even though she's sleep trained for nights). She's still falling asleep rather easily for the first two naps but she's now struggling just a bit for the cat nap, which I always have to wake her after 30mins or else it might just turn into another 1/1.5hr nap.. never brave enough to try allowing it.
I start a full time job in September and would be arriving home between 6-6:30. I'd really like to try shifting bedtime to 7 (ideally 8/8:30 someday) and hope for a 6am wake up but I don't know why she's waking at 5... is it habit? (shes woken up at 5 max, for as long as we can remember except when we sleep trained her that she was doing 6-6 for 2-3 weeks) is it teething/milestones/leap/too much napping/all of the above? Pulling my hair out here trying to figure this out!
TIA for any help!
