u/greenlines

My 8 month old keeps waking around 5/515am regardless of if we put her down at 7pm, 730pm or 8pm. Any ideas to get her to sleep until at least 6? Before night weaning we previously gave her a feed around 3-4am ish and she'd go back down and keep sleeping until ~7am (total avg around 11 hrs overnight), but since night weaning she seems unable to put herself back to sleep and is only doing ~9.5 hrs overnight. Is it from hunger? Should we put the feed back in to extend mornings? Or is this ok?

The other thing is she keeps pushing wake windows - she'll give sleepy cues early in the morning and around 730am, but by the time nap time rolls around (we target 9am) she doesn't seem tired even if she's been awake 4 hrs at that point. She'll also easily do 3.75/4 hrs for the following wake windows as well if we let her.

Wake windows are not super exact but have been like 3.75/3.5/4 or 3.75/3.75/3.75 with the early morning wakes. Sometimes we put her down at 3.5 hrs but she'll take a little longer to go to sleep. We're wary of putting her down too early as in the past she'll sometimes get increasingly worked up, try to climb out, become inconsolable etc and end up requiring checkins or an emergency nap.

Things we're already doing:

- We try to wait as close to 6am as possible before getting her from the crib, and wait at least 15 min after getting her to offer a feed

- We keep the first nap after 9am (although she often doesn't look sleepy until after 915am)

- room is fairly dark, not pitch black but shouldn't really be morning sun coming in

- Last feed is 30 mins before bed

Mainly concerned that she's getting less overall sleep with the dropped early morning feed.

Hi all, we're 3 weeks into sleep training our 8 month old, and while my baby is now usually able to put herself to sleep eventually (usually within 10-15min) she still gets super upset every single time we put her down. I'm wondering if our naptime and bedtime routines could be tweaked to help make the transition less abrupt for her. We don't bathe her everyday, and she isn't really interested in sitting still to read books, so we end up letting her play on her playmat until it's time to go upstairs to the crib.

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For bedtime, we'll do a feed, put her in her sleepsuit, then let her play on her play mat, try to read her a book or two if she'll let us (she'll often want to mouthe the book or go do something else partway), maybe sing some songs, then go upstairs to brush her teeth, rock her for a minute in her room, and put her in the crib. The issue is I feel the transition from playing on the mat to the crib is really abrupt, since brushing her teeth and bouncing her in her room only takes a couple minutes. And for nap time it's even more abrupt, just into the sleepsack and upstairs to the crib when she's showing enough sleepy cues.

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I don't really understand how people "wind down" their babies to prepare them for sleep, and get them relaxed and aware that sleep is coming. We don't spend much time in her room because it's quite small but we do have a recliner in there (although she doesn't like to sit still with us in there).

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Any thoughts, or is adjusting our routine not going to help much? Her schedule still fluctuates day to day but wake windows are usually something like 3.25/3.5/4.25. We've tried putting her down earlier but often she'll just cry longer and spend more time pulling on crib rails etc.