Getting rid of the last nighttime feeding/waking up too early?

[mamacolleen]

Okay, DD is 20 months. We co-sleep (since the beginning). We have a side-carred crib that she starts the night in and then usually by morning she's right thisclose to me.

We're recently nightweaned (this was on attempt #3) about a month ago. This was after 1-3 hour nightwaking all night long since she was about 3 months old. Helped along by a dip in my supply due to being pregnant (had an early loss and my supply has gone back up again, although I don't think it's at the levels it used to be). We nurse mostly on demand during the day when I'm home.

I have figured out that she needs roughly 12 1/2 hours sleep in 24 hours. Ideally this means she sleeps 11 hours at night because she really only has one 1 1/2 hour nap in the middle of the day. Maybe once a week she'll nap for 2 hours. So we generally get her to sleep at 8:30pm. I aim for 8pm but it doesn't always work out. This means that really she should be getting up for the day at 7am (ideal for me) but I would happily accept 6:30.

However, I've recently been trying to cut out the last feeding, which happens around 5:30ish. She'll nearly always sleep through from bedtime until then. But we're having not much luck cutting out this feeding and I'm not sure where to go from here or if I'm approaching this in the right way.

We think she might be genuinely hungry when she wakes up at 5 or 5:30 so we offer her some banana and water. She happily accepts and snuggles right back quietly for 20 mins or so, yawning a lot, and I know she's trying to go back to sleep but she can't. So she cries for "babas". The thing is, when I was still nursing her (as of a week ago) at this time, she often couldn't go back to sleep even with the "babas" (nursing). But she's tired. I know she's tired. And this means that she generally doesn't get the 12 1/2 hours she needs in the 24 hours, which means she's building up a sleep debt.

I've thought I should try and get her to bed earlier.... like 7-7:30 instead of 8-8:30 and see what happens. But I WOH a couple long days a week. And it's a real struggle sometimes to get home and dinner and the bedtime routine done in time. I'll still keep trying this but is there anything else I can do to encourage her to sleep like one more hour later in the morning? Or is this something we just need to ride out?

Another reason I'm concerned with cutting out this feeding is that I'm going to be working permanent nights (I'm a nurse) starting mid-April and so she's not going to have access to "babas" for half the nights.

Help!

[iheartwren]

We had the same issue and I was pregnant and ready to be done nursing at 21 months.  I slowly over 2 weeks or so cut that feeding down-every day I would feed her for 30 seconds less before I put her back down.  Then we were done and she asked a couple of times , but I just rocked her and put her back down.  She sleeps in her own bed so that sounds a little different.  Unfortunately it didn't help with the early wake up-she regularly wakes up between 5:30 and 6 and usually won't go back to sleep. 

[mamacolleen]

Thanks for the reply.

We're nightweaned completely and have been for about a month now, maybe a bit more.

I was just wondering how to cut out that last early morning wake-up.

I think, judging by the last few nights, her 'natural' wake-up is around 6:15-6:30. So I've resigned myself to accepting this time for now. But she does still often wake up anytime between 5:30/6 (this morning it was 5AM!) and I know she's not ready to be up for the day but most of the time she just can't go back to sleep.

It is a bit better when she goes to bed a little earlier, so I'm really going to be working on that over the next little while. It's just challenging some days to cram everything in to get her to bed on time. I don't like feeling like I'm rushing the evenings, even knowing that getting her to bed a little earlier means she wakes up a little later.