13Mo Old Now Wakes at 4:30Am

It sounds like a sleep pattern has been set with your daughter, so your plan should be to change it. I would work on reducing the level of interaction slowly so that she no longer expects to have her daiper changed, a bottle . . . eventually, she won't have much to wake for and she'll sleep longer before waking.

Just take it slow and make it as easy as possible for her. Her life is about to change in a huge way and you don't want her to feel like the new baby is getting all of mama's attention.

That is exactly what my 13 mo old does too. I don't think there is any getting around it. It is actually pretty normal because if you put her to bed at 7pm, then she has slept (more or less 9-10 hours on her own. If you have ever read or seen anything on TV about sleep cycles, not even adults sleep all the way through the night often, but we know how to put ourselves back to sleep very quickly. So, I think what you are doing is perfect and that is probably all you can do. Maybe have your husband change and give the bottle because you need the extra sleep, being pregnant. Keep up the good work and number 2 doesn't make it any easier! Woowee!

Hi,
Congratulations on your pregnancy! A 4:30am wake up time is normal for my little one. However, recently it turned into a 2am wake up time. The cause was our baby was getting cold in the middle of the morning. The increasingly cold mornings outdoors have caused the temperature to be lower in the home. So, we have raised the temperature of the house during the morning hours and now he sleeps much longer. Good luck!

Have you tried just leaving her in her crib for another hour or so to see if she'll go back to sleep on her own?

My 12mo has started doing this. In his case, it has nothing to do with temperature. His room is always the same temp.

He goes to bed around 6 p.m. He's always been an early riser (5:30 a.m.), but the past week he's been waking at 5. We've always left him in his crib until 6, and continue to do so even with this earlier wake time. Some mornings he will go back to sleep until closer to 6, or at least lie quietly until we come to get him.

What you don't want to do is establish a pattern of getting her up at these early hours because she may begin to wake earlier and earlier.

What time do you put her down for the night? If it is around 7:30 then she is sleeping 9-10 hours and how much more can you ask for? She takes a bottle when she wakes which tells me she is hungry, do you feed her right before laying her down for the night? If you are just giving a bottle then I would try something with a little more to substinance to it that will stay with her longer to keep her full through the night.

I would take out the bottle. It will be hard at first because she will protest, but once she realizes she will no longer get it, and is still expected to stay in bed, she will adjust to the your schedule. Children only set the schedule when adults allow them to!

I could have posted your question word for word...well, not the pregnant part but the 13m waking at 5am is exactly what has been happening here.

My daughter was sleeping completely through the night 8:30pm-8am until she got a bad cold. Over the past 2 weeks I got into the habit of going in to her when she would wake at 5am (she previously would wake, whine a bit, then go back to sleep on her own around the same time). With her being sick I went in and would give her a 4oz bottle but with only 2oz worth of formula (little extra nutrition and hydration), change her diaper and suck her nose if it needed it. She would then go back to sleep until 8ish. Now that the cold is gone, she has gotten into the habit of me coming in when she wakes at 5am and will cry instead of just go back to sleep. Starting this weekend (so my husband doesn't have to go to work in the morning) we are going to do a little tough love. I will go in and change her diaper and leave a sippy cup of water in her crib but no bottle. Then she will just have to cry it out. The diaper change is not the incentive for waking up, it's the bottle. I have a hard time letting her CIO without changing her diaper since I know it's loaded and has to be uncomfortable. This is how we got her off of the 4-5am feeding in the first place so I am sure it will work this time too. The longest she ever cried was 45 min and then she got quiet and went back to sleep, and that was only for 2 nights. I can live with that.