Am I wrong to expect my son to sleep past 4 am?

[deenass]

Sounds stupid right? My son just turned a year and we've been struggling with sleep from day one. The scenario we are now in is that he wakes up between 3:45- 4 am and is not interested in going back to sleep. Until recently I was bringing him to bed with me and nursing at that time and he would return to sleep until 6 am, but the last few weeks he won't go back to sleep. I just think that it's not reasonable to start the day at 4 am!

He has a regular bedtime (between 7-7:30) and keeping him up later is not an option, he's tired and cranky by that time and goes to sleep easily at that time.

He takes one nap a day - starting between 10:30 - 1:00 and sleeps for 1-3 hours. 2 naps are out of the question, he's happy with one and I haven't seen any correlation between when he naps (earlier vs later) and getting up the next day. I nurse him to sleep for naps. My husband usually rocks him to sleep at night, thought the last few days we've been putting him down sleepy and he has cried for between 90 sec and 5 mins and gone to sleep on his own.

I'm sure that many people would give their eye teeth for a baby who slept 8-9 hours, but waking at 4 am isn't fun, add to that the fact that my husband gets up for work at 4:30 so those last 45 mins of sleep are really important for him to have.

Any suggestions or do I just have to deal with my early riser?

Edited to say, I've read Ferber and the whole "detached last blcok of sleep" but because he doesn't usually want to nap until 11 am (after being up at 4 am) I find it hard to beleive this is the case.

[Lynnie]

i thankfully (sorry,,,) don't have any experience with that problem, but i have heard that some people put a bottle of water in the crib, and let the baby have that and/or then let them cry it out for a while if he/she won't go back to sleep, and eventually they will.

i personally could not function if my day started at 4 am, and i do think that at a year old , a baby can hopefully be taught to sleep longer... don't know though. sorry i can't be more helpful, and good luck ! i am sure people here will have wonderful suggestions.

[Karenn]

Colin went through a stage like that when he was just over a year. It was SO hard! It did eventually get better. (He slept 'till 7:45 this morning and in the days of 4am wake ups, I never thought that would happen!)

In our case, it was just one of those things that I had to wait out. I tried just about everything, and there wasn't much that helped. I think bringing him to bed with you is probably a good option. I did a similar thing with Colin- I'd have him go back to sleep on me in the recliner. It didn't always work, but on the days it did work, it seemed to get him in the habit of sleeping later.

Sometimes he did seem to be hungry or thirsty when he woke up, so I tried to prevent that with a late night snack (sometimes it was just a cup of milk.) Sometimes too, just offering him a cup of water when he woke up would encourage him to go back to sleep.

I know how hard it is! If your home during the day, don't feel guilty about sleeping when he naps- you're probably even more tired than you realize! When Colin started sleeping 'late' again, I remember thinking "Gosh, I knew I was tired, but I didn't realize I was THAT tired! I have so much more energy now!"

Hang in there, it will get better!

[Momof3Labs]

We've been there, too! We did the 4am thing a while back, and then for a while, Colin was sleeping until 7am, but lately it has been 6am, with a few 5:15am wake-ups in there, too. Honestly, I have to agree that you can't do much more than wait it out. CIO does NOT work for us at that hour, even though it worked for us at naptimes. Colin's up early and letting him cry doesn't put him back to sleep.

Have you tried putting a book or toy in his crib for him to read/play with when he wakes up? I guess that only works, though, if it isn't pitch black when he rises!

If it any consolation, we move the clocks forward in another week and a half - so he'll be sleeping till 5am! ;)

[molly]

This may not apply to your son because he's just a little older than my son when he was doing this same thing, but we started putting William to bed earlier at night. It's crazy how this works, but it almost always works for us. If William gets to bed past 7:00, we can be sure he'll be up 5-5:30, so we try to have him down by 6:30, some nights 6:00 if he didn't nap well that day. Sometimes this is impossible for people to do because of work hours, but it might just take a couple of nights of it to get back on track and then you could slowly move back to your regular bedtime. Also, I try not to turn on the lights until 6:00 am, (on mornings when he wakes up super early)- don't know if this really makes a difference, but for some reason I think I should do this! Hope you get some relief soon!