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Attachment Parenting
Ecy
member
Need advice about night wakings...
Ecy
member
For the past few weeks my DD has begun to wake anywhere from 1:30am to 4am. She isn't particularly fussy but she also won't go back to sleep. She sits up and asks for a cup of milk, wants to get out of bed and play. She can do this for up to 2 hours.
We do bedshare and she can easily get in and out of the bed without us. I don't want her to be roaming around the house and us not know. This hasn't happened yet because she wakes us up or I immediately hear/feel her.
Anyway, obviously I would prefer her to quit waking up in the middle of the night but I don't know what to do. I've tried to continuously lie her back down or just give her some milk when she asks for it and then lie her back down but usually she just wants to be awake. I know she's still tired though. I'm worried about the interrupted sleep affects her day. She is in DC and most of the time when she gets up at night, she falls back to sleep around 4:30 or 5 for example and then has to be forced awake at 7:30 to rush out of the house. I hate having to do this.
She goes to bed between 7:15-7:30 & I don't think I could push that back because she's very tired at this time. I don't think it would matter either because she has stayed up later on occasion and she still wakes in the night. She used to only slightly wake up and fuss and just had to be soothed for a minute and was back out. Now it's full fledge 3am play time at my house!
Advice? Help? It's making my DH and I very cranky, even with each other.
This discussion has been closed.
Re: Need advice about night wakings...
Have you tried to put her to bed any earlier? I know that it sounds counter-intuitive, but once we instituted an earlier bedtime, my daughter started sleeping longer n the mornings.
Another solution that I have for you would be to put a baby gate across your door, and maybe having a quiet corner in your room for her. You could put a nightlight in that corner and some books. She wakes up, and she can play quietly in that corner while you sleep. Maybe you could even leave a sippy cup for her there. I think that the more you cater to her at 3am, the more likely it is that she'll be getting up; the less fun you make it, the more likely that she'll sleep. (So, obviously, YOU don't get up with her.) But obviously, you can't force her to sleep...