early wakings & deep sleep

[becky1969]

I was interested to see this thread as my LO will be 5 months on sunday, and he consistently has problems with getting into a deep sleep after 4 am as well! He doesn't come fully awake, I just hear him constantly mantra crying as frequently as every 15 minutes, or as infrequently as every 30 minutes. It doesn't happen every night. We can go as often as a week where he only has one waking at 4 am. But 4 am seems to be the magic time!

When he has the really bad nights, I've gotten up to watch him, and I see that he's just jolting really hard and has trouble getting into the deep sleep. Sometimes I'll hold his legs down for him, and I can get him back into the deep sleep. But more often I'm just too darn tired myself to do that, so I play the paci game, where I go in, stick the paci in his mouth, and go back to bed and pray that's enough!

My guess is it's developmental. For instance, last night was horrid. Between 3:30 and 6:30 I got up 10 times to put the paci back in. What a dope I was. At any rate, I know the cause is because he's teething. It definitely wasn't pain cries (I know what THOSE sound like, believe me, because we're heard a lot of those the last few days!). If I'd been thinking straight, I would have held his legs down. Finally, at 6:30 I got my addled brains together and held his little leggies down for 10 minutes. That seemed to do the trick, because he then slept deeply until 7:30 - the longest stretch of sleep I'd gotten since 3:30 am. At that point, I got us both up since I didn't want us to get too off schedule today.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who goes through this! I'm going to look in Dr. Weissbluth's book today to see if 4 am is a natural biorhythm time for wakings, because I'll betcha that combined with developmental changes is what makes them become light sleepers that time of night. I think if you can wake up enough to get them thru the jolts, that may get them back into the deep sleep. At least, now that I've heard all of your experiences, that's what I'm going to try from here on out!

[debo620]

Please let us know what Dr.Wei.... book says about this. Thanks, Deborah

[becky1969]

Ok, I should have never posted here because my LO must have read over my shoulder and decided waking up all the way is what all the OTHER kids were doing so he should do it too!  Last night he woke up at 4:45 and wouldn't go back to sleep until 6. I left him in his crib until 5:30 because he was just talking to himself, but then he started crying so I tried rocking. Finally I gave him a bit of a bottle since he'd been up so long and it was nearly 6, and 1.5 oz put him to sleep. 

I think what happened was my DH (not so dear today) stayed up until 4:30, so when he came up our creaky stairs at a time when LO was already half awake because he was coming unswaddled. It's getting light here around that time, so he thought it was morning.  Those things combined got him all woke up. I'm having DH get black out shades today. It's the least he can do for starting this mess by coming to be so late!

I haven't had a chance to look in the book yet, but will today .

[KellyC]

Hi guys

A couple of things I've discovered when dealing with early wakings recently;

Firstly if your LO is exhausted when they go to bed at night then they go straight into a deep sleep and have their light sleep during the early hours - since they've already had their refreshing deep sleep during the early part of the night they can sometimes be up and ready to go when they come into that light sleep phase.  It's better to put your LO to bed earlier and to let them chat and drift into a light sleep so that they sleep deeper later on.

Secondly if you don't usually do a feed during the early hours but your LO is waking at say 5am or later you can go in and feed as soon as they start waking and treat this as half the breakfast feed (I bf so I give one boob and the other at the normal time).  Do the feed in the dark in the nursery and don't make any contact with your LO - if you're bottle feeding even better as you don't even need to et your LO out of the crib.  Once you've done the feed leave and see if your LO re-settles until their normal wake up time.  If not then you're back with shush/pat / PU/PD I'm afraid.  The idea is that by feeding them you don't let them get too awake and also that even though they may not be hungry when they first wake they could be by the time you've done PU/PD for an hour and by that time it's too late to get them back to sleep and you have a grumpy baby on your hands for the day.  It also allows you to keep on track with your usual nap routine, otherwise you get into a viscous circle of your naps being all over because you've had an early waking and then getting an early waking because you're naps aren't working as they should.

HTH
Kelly x

[x95stocchier]

ohhh....good idea Kelly! Thanks!  Do you think a later catnap would help not  getting to bed exhausted?  Also, I feed around 2 or so, I see you say if you don't usually feed in the early hrs...it's only 2.5-3 hrs later, but I will try.

[becky1969]

I think in our case, last night exhausted was the reason! Normally, LO gets a catnap but because of teething schedule was off so we skipped the catnap and went to bed a little earlier (6:30). I'm afraid he was still way overtired anyway. Thank you for your input!

However, we do often get restless sleep after 4 am most nights, even with the catnap. He gets 2 naps a day (2 hours each) and a catnap (45 minutes). Perhaps too much daytime sleep?

[x95stocchier]

Update.....I moved DS's catnap so he woke 90 min before bedtime.  He seemed less "overtired" when I put him down for the night, which was good.  He woke 20 min later this morning than yesterday! (success!) but still early, so I fed one side, then put him back down.  he cooed, played, rolled around, and drifted off about 15 min later, but woke up in less than 10 min and did the whole thing again till I got him up for the day.

Anyone else try this with success?  Maybe I need to do it a few days before it becomes effective?

[KellyC]

Becky - I think you may have hit the nail on the head suggesting too much daytime sleep.  It might be an idea to post on EASY to see how you might adjust your routine.

Sarah - I think you had a big success this morning actually    A slightly later wake up is good and the fact that he fell back to sleep at all is absolutely fantastic.  It's great that he'll play in his bed happily until wake up time and I'd continue to leave him doing this as it will help him to realise that he doesn't get up and out of bed until a certain time.  It also mean his awake time is being kept very low key so you're more likely to be able to stick with your usual routine and keep on track.  Most things take some time to take effect so I would keep up this plan for at least a week or two and then re-assess.

Kelly x

[becky1969]

kelly, thanks for your help!

Our typical routine:

Awake at 7

E 7:15
A 7:45-8:45
S 9-11

E 11:15
A 11:45-12:45
S 13:00-15:00

E 15:15
A 15:45-16:30
S 16:45-17:15 (catnap)

Bedtime routine starts
A (light activity, like swing while mom & dad finish dinner)
E 17:45 (start bottle, but usually doesn't finish)
Bath 18:00
18:15 finish bottle, start wind down routine for bed
18:45/19:00 bed time. He almost never goes to bed past 7 pm. Lately, I've found 6:45 is the sweet spot, but hitting it really depends on how the rest of our day has gone in terms of what time we got up, when we napped, etc.

Dream feed 10:30/10:45


The thing is, we've had light sleep after 3/4 am since he started sleeping thru the night at 12 weeks. I think it may have something to do with the fact that that's about the time my DH goes to bed!  We live in a creaky old house, so when he comes upstairs, you can really hear the stairs creak (LOs bedroom is literally 3 feet across the hall from ours) and turns on the bathroom light, which partially shines in LOs room. I think he's just in a naturally light sleep mode then due to when the dream feed is, so gets partially woken up.

Last night was better. He didn't start stirring until after 5 am. I think this time due to the poo that arrived after he woke up! I went in and gave him paci 2 times, DH 2 times, but he kept jolting awake. Finally, I held his legs down for about 10 minutes to get him past the jolts and he slept from 6:30-7:10 without another peep.

 But i'm definitely willing to look at too much daytime sleep - I'm just saying this has been LOs pattern since he started sleeping thru the night. Some nights worse than others, but we always hear him start making noise after 4 am - some nights only once others many many times.

[KellyC]

Hi Becky

That's a fab routine (I never achieved anything so perfect looking!) but it might be worth reducing the naps a little and adding the extra onto A time.  I would do this really gradually - so take 5 or 10 minutes off his daytime sleep and then do the same after a few more days and again until you're where you want to be (which is without an early waking!).  If at some point he doesn't seem to be coping with the shorter nap and increased A time then you can put it back up, no harm done.  I'd be tempted to keep the long 2 hour pm nap and cut back on the am nap as this will help night sleep and also help him get to bedtime once he drops the catnap.  In the next month or two you'll probably be looking at dropping the catnap (with us Zander just started to really fight it so we stopped trying to bother - it was at 5-6 months).  You probably won't stop the light sleep during the early hours, it's definitely normal here too.  The difference will be that your LO is tired enough to stay asleep.

Kelly x

[becky1969]

Thank you so much Kelly! I think you're definitely putting me on the right track. We extended A time yesterday to 2hr20 minutes, and he went down for his naps so much easier and just slept fabulously (didn't even stir at teh 45 minute mark!). However, I had doctor's appts, so my DH went ahead and let him sleep as long as he wanted (he works at home, so I think he just wanted to get work done! can't blame him!). So instead of  1hr40 naps we had a 1hr50 nap and a 2hr nap, and then our 30 minute cat nap. However, even that slight difference seems to have helped because we had one major cry at 4:30, and that was it! Then he woke for the morning at 6:30 because he became unswaddled (went to bed at 7:15 last night). I'm very excited about this! I think with a little more adjustment we can really cut out all that noise in the AM!

I like the idea of keeping the longer PM nap, because that's when I tend to get the most work at my job done (I also work at home), so that would work best with my schedule. He also does seem to want to nap less in the AM anyway.

Thank you again! (and our schedule doesn't ALWAYS look that perfect - I've battled the 45 minute nap monster 3 times now! but I've beat him everytime, and feel pretty proud about that!  My baby is just so textbook it's like he has an alarm clock in his head and will wake up on his own at the 2 hour mark. It's kind of spooky!).

[KellyC]

I have an extremely textbook baby too - just as well as I'm an extremely textbook mummy!  I'm so pleased things have improved for you.  The 40 minute nap monster never truly moved out of our house until a couple of weeks ago when I finally found a way of doing w2s which worked for us and Zander is almost 9 months old    So you're doing better than we did!

Kelly x

[KellyC]

I meant to add that Zander now has 30 minutes in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon and it's lovely to have that big chunk of time (though I don't get anything done, just f@rt around on the computer!)