2 year old sleep regression?!?!?!

[awilken]

Hi all,
My son is almost 23 months old and for the past 4 weeks has been having some horrible early morning wake up times.. I am talking between 4:00-5:45. His old schedule was...
In crib at 7-7:15, asleep by 7:30
Awake- 6:15-7:00
Nap always at least 2 hours (awake time ranged from 6 - 7 hours max)

Nothing has changed except the fact that he is waking up in the middle of the night randomly and very early in the morning. I feel like he is changing sleep cycles but then not fully falling back to sleep. The other thing that is happening is that it is taking him a lot longer to fall asleep at night than it used to. He used to fall asleep within 15 minutes, now it is taking him up to 45 minutes.

Prior to this, he used to always sleep 11-12 hours. Now he is sleeping between 9-10 hours. The problem that is happening now is that because he wakes up super early (and goes to daycare) his awake time is a lot longer before his nap than normally. So he is constantly over tired I feel? However, he has always been able to adjust to this in the past but this is going on 4 weeks now and it is killing me...

I am wondering if we are in the middle of the 2 year old sleep regression or I am missing something.  Any advice or help will be greatly appreciated!!!
Thank you so much,
Alexa aka one tired momma

[creations]

Hello and welcome to BW forums
Sorry you didn't get a reply sooner.  I'm going to get your thread moved over to Toddler sleep as you Lo is older than 1yo.

A set nap time is good at this age, rather than varying the time he naps based on A times (of 6 or 7hrs as you said), so if you haven't already switched to a set nap time I would suggest doing that right away.  Just choose a time you think is about right based on what he was doing before his morning WU went so early and then because he is early waking shift that time by say 15-30 min later which should allow for the change he has had in sleep needs, that will discourage the EW.  If the "set" nap time doesn't work out to be in the right place then you can shift it again in a week or so after seeing how he has settled into it.
Same with BT, I would shift it about 30 min later than you are usually doing it and "set" it there (set times can change based on how LO responds to the routine and what the problems are but they don't change daily).

Once you have those 2 set times in place you may see the WU time shifting later.
You might need to shift the "set" times of nap and BT later again to work with his new later WU time.
Once things settle down a bit it will be easier to see if his nap length needs to be reduced to help him have a longer night.  Sometimes reducing the nap by 15 mins can add another 30-60 mins to the night sleep, although it depends on the individual.  This would mean starting nap at the same time but capping it and possibly bringing BT earlier to add the sleep onto the night - but I'd hold off on this until you have shifted and set the nap and BTs otherwise you have lots of different things going on at once.

hope this helps