Hi Mary
I want to say that i agree that having a consistent wake and bedtime is important but want to reassure you that your lo wake up does not have to be 7am! not too many of us are lucky enough to have those babies that do 12 hours every night. that is an ideal night but many babies sleep 10-12 hours and many babies no matter what you do have their own internal waking set for 6 or 6:30 am and nothing is going to encourage them to sleep until 7
so don't feel like you are doing something necessarily wrong if lo never achieves 12 hours :wink:
now about your questions:
I'd like to get him on a more "strict" routine, but what do I do if he wakes up @ 5am instead of the scheduled time of 7am?
When he wakes up he cries until he eats so then the feeding times even get thrown off. I've tried to treat it as a night waking, but most early mornings he wants nothing to do with sleeping-- he's just had enough.
you have to set some boundaries for him and yorself and stick with them. for me i decided (and this is a common one) that 6am was the earliest i woudl start the day so anything before then i woudl feed like a night feeding and try to get lo back to sleep. if my dd's woke at 6:10 i woudl just start the day as i thought after 11 hrs sleep they had obviously had enough. if you want 7 am to be the earliest than the only way would be to treat everythign else as nightwaking and work at getting ds back to sleep after the feed even if itresults in only 20 min more sleep and then wake up to start the day. you just have to make a choice but be prepared for some compromise if lo is one of those that will not be resettled at 6am no matter what.
with EASY because it is a routine and not a schedule you do need to be flexible in the sense that if he starts at 6:15 that day you can plan for that day a bit because you have a rough idea of his A times (so woudl know approximately when he needs to go down for naps and be home etc) and work around that. soon enough you may find he starts to regulate himself enough that you coudl impose set nap times (this can develop in the 6-9 mo window) so even if he wakes at 6:30 one day and 7am the next his first nap might be 9am for a few months etc and then you canplan things around his set A times
Or what if he takes a 40min nap instead of the normal 1.5hrs? He can't go more than about 2.25hrs in btwn naps...
if he only takes a 40 min nap are you trying to extend for a while or are you just getting him up as soon as hewakes- you could seek specific help on the nap board and/or read some of the announcementsont hat board for some guidance.
if you are not extendign or he refuses to extend and you get him up, then you tweak the next cycle of EASY - so if he is not hungry yet because of short S time, you woudl then have A times before and after eating so you end up with a cycle of AEASY. this is something that again might go away in the coming months
The only thing that seems to stay consistent is his bedtime of 7:15- 7:30pm.
like PP said this is a really good thing - if bedtine stays cosistent and you have a solid evening routine and he sleeps thorugh then you are just waiting for the morning to settle into a routine and this is part of it - so that he has that consistent base each night. some people have found that (if anythign) putting lo down earlier results in later wake time (rather than keeping them up...)
also if day starts earlier than usual you can often stretch the last A time successfully to keep lo bedtime routine the same
hope some of this helps - i do think the next month or 2 will be when he starts to set regular daytime patterns.
