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I haven't read any books on the subject .... but we start bath time at 8 so bed time is around 8:30. My lo never wakes up before 8:30. It's 9:30 and she's still sleeping!

11.5 hours is a lot of sleep, and it'd be tough to make him sleep more than that if he is sufficiently rested. If he were only sleeping 10 hours I would say that you might be able to get him to sleep more at night.... but alas 11.5 is a lot!

My LO is on that same schedule and frankly, 11.5 hours of night sleep is awesome and you can't really expect a baby to want more! He definitely teased you with those later wake ups (were they bad nap days?) but it's less common for babies to need more than 11-12 hours of sleep per night.

I would love my LO to be a 7-7 sleeper but that is wishful thinking.

If the later bedtime had your LO waking later, then maybe 11.5 hours is all he needs overnight. If the previous schedule was working for you, maybe go back to it.

DS sleeps from 8 to 6 or 6:30. Changing his bedtime really didn't impact how long he slept. We did try sleep training a bit in the mornings, and got DS to stop waking before 6, but he won't sleep much later than that. During the week he takes a 3 hour nap at daycare. On weekends he takes 2 shorter naps.

The books are great for advice, but they don't have the answer for every family. It sounds like since you are up later at night, having your LO go down later and wake up later is better for your family. 11.5 hours is a long stretch, so if he goes down at 7:30, you get more quality time in the evenings and don't have to wake up so much earlier.

When we sleep trained DS to sleep later in the morning, I would get up when he first woke up. I turned the monitor up real loud so I would hear when he first started moving around, hopefully getting to him before he was all the way awake. I had a bottle with 2 oz milk in it ready and waiting. I took it to DS, changed him if he needed it, and left him in his crib, drinking the bottle and holding his paci in the other hand. When he was done with the bottle, he'd pop the paci in and roll over to his blanket and fall back asleep. That was best case scenario. Other days he wouldn't fall back asleep, but once I had done those things, I would leave him in there until it was wake up time (6:30). If he fell back asleep, we woke him at 6:45. If not we got him up around 6:30. He would fuss and cry a bit, but would usually be content for a while until he fell asleep or we got him up. The hardest thing was that since he goes to daycare, I couldn't let him sleep much past 7:00 if he did fall back asleep. A couple days he fell asleep right before 7:00 and I felt horrible waking him up to leave. But after about 2 weeks he was consistently sleeping until 6:15ish, and is usually content to talk to himself and roll around until about 6:30.

I'm a morning person, so it's not a big deal to me.

As others have said, and you have tried, I bring him into bed and nurse him in side-laying and then fall asleep with him like that (or I leave him there and sneak out of bed and enjoy an early-morning coffee, since I love mornings), but my guy does fall asleep again if it's before 7am.

But in a similar way, when he wakes up from nap before 1 hour, I just leave him in there. (I can do this now that I feed him before naps). I need a one hour break and he can deal with some quiet time in his crib until I'm ready to be a mommy-on-duty again. Sometimes he falls back asleep.

I think if you fed him and then put him either back in his crib or a pack and play he should be fine for another hour by himself, even awake. But every baby is different and he might just make a morning-person out of you!

@Coco Bee: What is your LO's last nap time? My LO's last nap is from 5:30ish- 6:30. If she isn't awake by 6:30, I wake her up. Then she is good until bed time at around 8.

The thing that finally worked for us was completely blocking out the light in the room. We got black out shades and curtains and make it as dark as possible. We found he would wake up when we stirred as the light came in. If it was bright at all (5 am through the summer) he was awake.

I have no advice for you because my kids have always been early risers. Some kids are just programmed that way, I think. It was an adjustment at first (I LOVED sleeping in, pre-kids), but 2 years later, I can't sleep past 7 am even if I try.

@Honeybee: I think we're trained somehow into thinking babies are sleep machines, but if you think about it, adults all have different sleeping habits, so there's no way that one doctor can write a book and have a solution for everyone. Some babies just aren't textbook sleepers, you know?

My husband sleeps like crap, and guess what, he passed that on to our son!

My guess is that he's probably just ready to be up for the day. I know some people are dogmatic about early bed time, but for us it didn't work. I never put LO down before 7 pm because I know that he will only sleep 12 hours and I don't want to get up before 7 am. Currently we're doing 7:30-7:30.
My other thought is that maybe some light is already coming into the room at that hour?

@looch: I totally agree. There is no possible way Sawyer would go to sleep as early as 6:30/7pm! I worked night shifts when I was pregnant, and both me and DH are night owls, and Sawyer is too. It took 3 months of work to get him to sleep at 10pm as opposed to midnight or 2 am! Of course the 4 month sleep regression has turfed all of that now.