Hellobee Boards

I don't have any advice for the early wake-up, but we just went from the 3rd to 4th schedule on this pdf (except I still feed on demand).

http://noobmommy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/EASY-Schedule-Cheat-Sheet.pdf

I realized that I needed an idea of what she should be doing, so I just googled 6 mo schedules.

@Honeybee: I don't have much advice for the early wake up time. I tried putting my LO to bed late hoping he'd sleep longer but he still gets up his usual time. I did read somewhere that it may be more fruitful to change the morning routine - keep the lights off, noise to a minimum until its closer to normal wake up time. If you do that for longer periods each day he may start to push his wake up time, or at leat learn to be quiet and still until you pick him up

@winniebee: what happens when you try to keep him up until 9am? Does he melt down?

I would try to keep him awake for as long as you can before the first nap. Sammyfab gave me great advice about this that I followed and it totally worked!

Since the time change, DS had been waking up at ridiculous times like 4:30-5am. On Saturday he woke up at 4am and would not go back to sleep and would not even nurse. So I decided to keep him up for 4 hours which is the longest awake time that he's ever had. I nursed him at 6am, fed him cereal and fruit at 7am and put him down at 8am. He stayed awake quite happily and may have been able to stay awake longer but I didn't want to push it. He fell asleep right away and slept for 2 hours! Never had such a long nap out of him before. That put him on track for a 1pm nap and he slept for 1.5 hours. He went down for a 6:20pm bedtime and since then he's been waking up around 6am.

@London Mama: That's good news! I was hoping that leaving him in his crib until his scheduled wake up time would get him on the right track!

@winniebee: I think when our LOs don't nap well it's easy to do whatever it takes. However, your LO may actually start napping better when on a schedule. I use the term loosely. We were anti-schedule/pro-follow cues until we realized that LO just wasn't getting enough sleep. It wasn't healthy. Since we've started the routine her naps have improved exponentially!

But there's still room for flexibility. For instance, this morning LO woke up at 6 instead of 7:30. So, she went down for her first nap at 7:45 and slept until 10:20. She went down for nap #2 at 1:20 and is still sleeping. We'll keep her up until her bedtime at 7:30. It doesn't follow her normal days, but it's what she needed today.

@Honeybee: That's very true. And we had great success with following DDs cues for 4.5-5 months. Then it became...not so successful. It's a good (and frustrating) thing that there's no "one size fits all" approach for parenting

@winniebee: C was a very poor napper and her sleep drastically inproved when naptime got more structured.

To get her to sleep-in longer, I just started leaving her in the crib until I absolutely had to go get here. Normally, she wakes up babbling and happy and she's content to lay in her crib for about an hour usually. I will not get her out of her crib until 8am. She usually sleeps until then, so it's no big deal, but when she does wake up earlier she stays put until then. I don't want to reinforce that getting up early means that I will come get her.

As for the schedule, I never really put her on one. I waited until she started to normalize into one on her own and that became our schedule. It's not even a super strict schedule. We just put her down 2-2.5 hours after she wakes up. She has distinct sleepy cues, so we follow her lead.

What really worked for us was a strict nap and bedtime routine so she would learn that those things mean it's time to sleep. As she has gotten older and become a better sleeper, we have been able to relax it. At first, it was diaper change, swaddle, bottle, nap. Now, I can just throw her in the sleepsack and put her in the crib.

I think her getting older really had a lot to do with it as well.

@winniebee: If his schedule is regular enough on it's own, which is sounds like it is, I would say that giving him set times would be fine. C's nap times have about a half an hour of leeway. Like... her morning nap starts between 10 and 10:30.

I hope he gets better with age like she did. I've been in your shoes, so I totally empathize.

@winniebee: We did 30 minute naps for a loooong time. The bite the big one. Have you tried leaving him to fall back asleep? This was another thing we did. She would wake up screaming after 30 minutes and I would go up and resettle her and then let her cry/whine/fuss for a little bit to see if she would fall back asleep. Eventually, she started sleeping longer.

@winniebee: If he's waking up happy... then he probably just doesn't need a longer nap.