Advertisements
Hi all - I usually post on the Guatemala board, but I wanted to see if anyone here had words of wisdom!Background: Our daughter is now 12 and a half months old. When she first came home at 8 months she waking up several times in the middle of the night when she first came home. We eventually sleep trained her (Ferber). It went really well and she stopped waking up multiple times and being unable to get back to sleep. However the flip side was that she was clearly done sleeping through the night at around 5:30am. We were not happy about this, but we eventually got into a schedule that seemed to work well for everybody: She would wake up at 5:30 but was generally happy to just stay in her crib till about 6am. She takes her first nap at 8am, which lasts anywhere from 45 minutes to 1 and a quarter hours. She has her second nap at 1pm, and it lasts anywhere from an hour to an hour and 45 minutes. (She gets anywhere between 2 and 3 hours of naps per day). Then she goes to bed around 6:30pm.Then for about a week she started varying widely in her wake ups, waking up at 5am some mornings and 6am others. Then that stopped, and for the past week she's been waking up for the day at 4:45am! She doesn't want to be awake at that point, but she's too agitated to get back to sleep at that point (she's not crying generally, but she's kicking and babbling like she's got lots of nervous energy). We've tried ignoring her, giving her a bottle, rocking her, bringing her to our bed, and nothing seems to work. We've been trying to keep the rest of her schedule the way it has been, but we feel that something has to give. Waking up this early makes her REALLY overtired during the day, even if she takes long naps (and not surprisingly, her AM nap has been on average longer then it used to be since this started). She gets cranky much more easily and is much less resilient. She is an extremely high energy girl (who is very close to walking on her own) and she really, really needs her sleep or she's a mess.Can anyone gives us words of wisdom/hope? Mommy and daddy are very sleepy, and poor Miss Anabel is all askew. .
Like
Share
(((((hugs))))) I feel your pain! Our DD did something similar (sleeping through the night till about 7:30am, but at around 12 or 12.5 months waking multiple times and getting up way earlier than usual). We were at wits end, I was cranky from not having enough sleep, and DD was cranky both from her sleep being disrupted and me being cranky. Not sure what did it for us, but we suspect teething. We thought she was cutting top teeth when in fact she was cutting bottom molars! :eek: And to top it off, she was working on cutting both top teeth as well and a bottom molar on the other side! But, once that first molar popped through, she seemed to be okay and went back to her normal sleep schedual. Sorry I can't be more help, but I think you're doing right by trying to keep her routine constant despite the interruptions. You are not alone!
Advertisements
Same thing has happened here a few times, during growth spurts or heavy teething, although it's usually been more to the middle of the night wakings. We've usually just been able to wait it out until it passes. Sometimes putting them to bed later doesn't help, as they may not sleep later. But I wonder if you could push her bedtime back even just 30 minutes (over a period of a few nights, trying 10 minutes later at a time), if thaat would help and work with your schedule. Oh, the sleep woes are horrible!