Looking for advice…
My 8-month-old consistently wakes about 2.5 hours after bedtime. Sometimes we get closer to 3 hours, sometimes it’s as early as 1 hour. After that, she wakes roughly every 45mins-2 hours until around 3am, and then finally seems to settle into deeper sleep with one 3-hour stretch at the end.
Schedule is roughly: 3/4/4.5
Wake: 6:40 (±15 mins)Nap 1: 10:00 (30–40 mins, I usually wake her)Nap 2: 2:30–3:00 (1h10–1h30, she wakes on her own)Bedtime: 8:00–8:30
On average she sleeps 12.5 hours in a 24 hr period.
She falls asleep independently about 80% of the time for both naps and bedtime, and bedtime itself is usually very easy.
For that first wake, we resettle by rocking or butt pats, but it can involve a lot of crying and take anywhere from 5–10 minutes of butt pats to 40-60 minutes of rocking. Lately I’ve been bring her into bed with me for the remainder of the night and feeding/butt patting to sleep. If I didn’t do this I’d be up and down out of bed so many times but is the co-sleeping just reinforcing these wakes now?
She’s always been on the lower sleep needs side. Recently we pushed bedtime later (closer to 8:30) because she didn’t seem tired earlier, but she still seems quite restless overnight (lots of movement). Very happy in her wake windows, gets a little fussy in the last half hour. She falls asleep within 10 mins of being out in her crib.
There also seems to be a pattern where we get one decent night, then a worse one, then even worse, then the worst, and then it resets again.
I’ve also wondered about iron/ferritin levels, but our doctor doesn’t feel it’s necessary to check at this point.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Did anything help smooth out that first stretch of night? She has never been a “good sleeper” so this isn’t a new thing. We work on sleep pressure ALOT but I don’t know what to change from here. Under tired overtired? Ugh so hard to know.
Thank you 💜