Early bird!

[emilyash]

Help! Is there any way to get my 15mo ds to sleep later?

Right now he takes 1 nap/midday (1-2 hrs) @ daycare, and on the weekends an am & pm nap (seems to need to catch up on the weekends). He rises around 5-5:30 every day, and goes to bed around 7pm. Is that just enough sleep for him, or what? He's generally cheerful and happy, and in the evening at bedtime if we say "time to go sleepy" he happily trots over to the bottom of the stairs and waits for us to take him up. He's goes down so easily.

Right now the 5:30 am is just a little rough, since we have to rise for work around 6, but come summer (& new baby sibling in July) we won't need to get up so early. Yes I know I'll probably be up anyway with the new one, but it would be great if I could tweak his schedule so he'd at least sleep until 6 (or even 7!!!)

His room is dark. We've tried a later & earlier bedtime, no difference. Sometimes if he wakes too early at 4:30 we let him fuss for a bit and he falls back asleep, but sometimes when it's a bit later we can tell by his cry that he's up for good. He sleeps in his crib in his own room about 10 feet from us. (We coslept until about 9 months.)

[JessieBird]

We have almost the exact same situation, except I have till October before the new baby comes and we bedshared until just a few weeks ago. DS is definitely sleeping better in his crib in his own room but he is still an early riser. So far we have been getting up with him but it is really hard and so we're now putting more effort into soothing him back to sleep. He will easily go back down for another 15 minutes or so and I'm hoping that time will get longer and longer.

I posted about this in the Family Bed and Nighttime Parenting forum a while back and most responses suggested that we baby proof the heck out of our upstairs (or his room or whatever area makes sense), provide accessible and safe breakfast snacks that he can feed himself and just let him play by himself while we keep sleeping/lounging. I think we're going to try that approach this weekend. DS is really good at playing by himself, though he tends to be really needy in the morning so I'm not sure how it'll go. Someone also suggested to me that this is what bedroom TVs are for. I'm not ready to go that route as we hardly watch TV to begin with (and DS doesn't seem very interested in TV anyway) but it's in my back pocket.