Stopping Your Baby From Waking Up Too Early
- January 16, 2014
- by Melissa Lawrence
Hello, and welcome back to CloudMom! I’m doing a video today to address another concern from a Facebook community mom, Yolanda Solomon, on when to transition from 3 naps to 2 naps. This is such a perfect time to ask that question, because I’m actually in the process of making another video on when you should drop the third nap! Yolanda said that her baby currently wakes up at 5:50 a.m., and I’m almost willing to bet that it’s because her baby is taking naps too early in the day. This can be a tricky habit to overcome, so I’ll share what I’ve learned and hopefully that will help!
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Why is my baby waking up too early every morning?
I’m going to assume that if you’re baby is waking up too early in the morning, then they are probably taking their morning nap somewhere in the ballpark of between 8 and 10 a.m. This would mean that an afternoon nap would fall between 12 and 2 p.m., and by 5 p.m., your baby is probably exhausted. The thing is, 5 p.m. is still way too early to put your baby down for the night. So what do you do? When this happened to me, I discovered that I was better off when I did the third cat nap at around 5:30pm for 45 minutes to 1 hour, then got the baby up, fed them dinner, and put them down for the night at 8 p.m. I found that if I fed them dinner at 5 p.m. and put them down around 6 p.m., my babies would wake up too early. Counter-intuitive, isn’t it?
As adults, we sort of assume that when we’re tired, we’ll sleep more. This was not my experience with my five babies, which I think has to do with their sleep cycles. Sometimes when kids and babies are very tired, their sleep cycles are thrown off and they wake up earlier. I found that my kids woke up later when I put them down at 7:30 p.m. then when I put them down at 9 p.m. It’s just one of those things that doesn’t quite add up, but that’s life! All of this varies and each child is different, of course, but this has been my experience and I hope it is helpful to you!
Mamas, how do you deal with your baby waking up too early? Do you have any tried and true methods for getting your kiddies to sleep longer? Drop a comment below and share your experiences!
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