10 month old wakes at 30 minutes

[samalama10]

Help!  My baby is almost 11 months old and is STILL waking at 30 minutes.  During the day, I typically lay with him during naps to try to get him back to sleep at the 30 minute mark.  A 1.5 hour nap is really three 30 minute naps.  Sometimes he won't even go back to sleep despite my nursing him back to sleep, or even singing/bouncing on the exercise ball. 

At night he will fall to sleep,and I'll get up and leave him in our bed (surrounded with pillows, with a baby monitor so he won't crawl off, and our bed is low) and he'll wake in 30 minutes,  then I'll go in to soothe him to sleep by nursing him; it will only take 5 to 10 minutes to get him back down, then I'll get up again so I can hang out with my husband.  I spent months, and sometimes still do, falling asleep when he does.  He won't get into a deep sleep without waking until we come to bed.  So, I understand that during the night, it seems that he needs a person there to get to a deep sleep state, but during the day, he wakes at 30 minutes even with me sleeping with him. (I guess he wakes even with me there at night when I'm just getting him down, it just takes him until a certain time of night to get to a deep sleep state???)

Sometime when he wakes, he sits bolt upright in an instant, but sometimes he just stirs a bit and I can get him back down to sleep. 

He just had an osteopathic manipulation, the Dr. said that everything looked good to her.  But both her and his pediatrician seem to think that it's a bit odd that he's still waking at 30 minutes.  In Pantle's "No Cry Nap Solution" she basically says that a sleep cycle is nothing less than 40 minutes, and if your baby is waking at 30 minutes, than it's "something else" and that she doesn't know what is causing it. 

I've tried everything.  white noise, a high level of activity, feeding him, etc.  he's done this from day one.  It's getting slightly better as he gets older, but it's still happening daily.

Is anybody else's baby doing this?  If yours did and doesn't, what did you do to help them sleep?  How long will this last? 

[sk8boarder15]

My 10 month old doesn't always do that, but often does.... I came on here to look for help too but just found commiseration! 

[D_McG]

I would nightwean (even partially) and if that doesn't work I would do a sleep study.

For DS (who sometimes woke like your child) I first stopped nursing him from  his bedtime to mine (say, 7pm to 10pm) and either sang/cuddled him or had my DH respond.  This worked so well that I started it with my DD around 6 months.  They basically had to figure out that they didn't HAVE to nurse every time they woke up.  Once they got over that they started to sleep much more reasonably.

Edited by D_McG - 7/30/11 at 6:36pm

[gemasita]

I think sleep cycles can be as short as 30 mins.  My 6mo does this too - at naps and at night (when we first put him down at night, at least).  I try things that will lull him back to sleep like having him nap in the swing, swaddled, with white noise.  But, like your LO, mine doesn't always go back to sleep and sometimes I just have to try again later.  Sometimes I nap with him on my lap so I can nurse him when he wakes up (which is getting a little exhausting since I can't have any "me" time during the day to get a few things done).  At night, I go to bed with him and pull the boob out at the 30 min mark.  I hope it doesn't last forever but I try not to stress about it too much.  It's hard though so I commiserate!  I do think it's a sleep cycle thing.

[sere234]

My 11 mo does that exact same thing!!! Eeek!! He's slept like this since about 3 or 4 months, stopped for 1 month, then went back to waking every 30 minutes around 7 months.

Only thing that helped was having DH take care of the 30 min wakings. I generally put DS to bed, DH takes over after that. Surprisingly DS responded az

[sere234]

Whoops, typing on my phone and baby sent that too early:)

Anyway, DS did great WITHOUT me aiding him at 30 minutes at night. He still wakes at random intervals during naps but with DH helping him at night, he falls back to sleep much quicker at night. So maybe let your partner take a try? Might be tough inthe beginning but it sure did help DH to be more confident, me to be impressed with him! and relaxed, and DS to learn to fall asleep in a different way.

I've also wondered why DS doesn't wake at he normal 45 min mark! I just assume it's something that is normal for him and since he's a baby and still learning to sleep well, I am not worried at all anymore. Just another quirk to my kid!

Hope that helps! Hang in there!

[pitters]

Our 10-month-old pretty much always wakes between 35-50 after being put down (whether naps, night time, etc), and generally insists on nursing to go back to sleep.  We haven't really been able to get anything to work, either, and it's starting to wear on us.  So I feel your pain!

[luckymamaoftwo]

Ack! My babe is 18 mo and wakes after 30 min every. single. night. So I empathize. :( I will be following this thread for sure!

[sunwise]

My almost one-year-old has fallen into an interesting pattern recently  - if I nurse him to sleep (for naps or bedtime), he will take a short (30-40 minute) nap or have a wakeup within 20-30 minutes of me putting him to sleep. On the other hand, if I nurse him before he is tired enough to fall asleep, let him grab a pacifier and play for awhile, and then fall asleep on his own, he will take a one hour (or longer) nap, or at bedtime, he won't have the early wakeup.

I don't really know how to make this work to my advantage yet, because I can't completely control when he feels like nursing to sleep versus when he wants to fall asleep on his own. But I am trying to figure it out!

For the record, this does not impact his later night wakings - he might have very few on a night he nurses to sleep and tons on a night he falls asleep on his own. Or vice versa.

[DrezdinsMama]

We-e-ell, I think you're looking for a way to put your son down before 30 minutes are up and have him stay down, and unfortunately I don't have a solution for that.

All I can say is that my son (13 months) tends to wake up if I put him down before ~45 minutes after nursing.  He likes to be held, and I've accepted that, so I freaking hold him until I'm sure he is in a deep sleep.  For naps, our nanny holds him and when she's not around I put him down after 45 minutes then nurse him back to sleep if he wakes up soon afterward.  Then he'll stay asleep another 20 - 60 minutes, depending on how tired he is.  He takes 1 or 2 naps a day.  I notice he sleeps better in our bed then in his (sidecar) crib.

From Pantley's book, she says naps are very important for a good night's rest, so it's worth it for me to make sure he sleeps well.  If that means holding him a long time -- so be it.

For bedtime, I do the same thing (in the bedroom, lights out, in a rocking chair).  I nurse, pull him off when he seems done, then sit him a little bit more upright to make sure he doesn't have any gas issues.  Then when I'm sure he's in a deeper sleep, I lay with him in bed (arm under his head) and s-l-o-w-l-y pull away.  I pull away when he rolls to his other side or when he is sound asleep.  That usually results in ~2 hours of sleep after putting him down.  Then he wakes and has a ~4 hour stretch of sleep, then smaller stretches after that.

If he wakes up within an hour after initially putting him down my DH can usually put him back to sleep (exception is during teething!).  Usually the cause is gas and we try to respond right away so he doesn't fully wake up.  Last week he had fever with a new tooth and didn't want anyone but me to comfort him.  And he woke up very often.

Recently he's showing signs of sleep maturity.  One day he had a late second nap (~5pm) woke up an hour later then went to bed ~9:30pm.  Then he slept for 8 hours straight.  OMG, he hasn't done that since he was 2 months old.  That was 2 weeks ago.  Last night he again had a second nap at 5pm, woke up an hour later, went to bed ~9pm and slept for 4.5 hours.  Funny thing was, we were nursing and at some point he didn't want to nurse any more but lay in my arms twitching a bunch w/ his eyes closed.  So I put him down.  He woke up immediately, so I rocked/sang a little more, again he started twitching a bunch, and I put him down and he rolled over a couple times and fell asleep.  The whole routine took about 40 minutes. 

I look forward to the day when he can do that more often!

[rupunzlkim]

Let me start off by saying that what I'm going to say will be unpopular, but I accept that.  Heck, I might get booted off the board, but oh well...

When our daughter was having the same issues (I kept wondering why she was waking before the 45 min mark like our other daughter did), I tried the Baby Whisperer methods of basically being there when she woke up so to try and help her get back to sleep without her waking too fully.  And if I could catch it right, I'd have my hand on her back at that magic moment and maybe the most she'd do was a slight rustle and sigh before drifting back off.  The goal was to help her past the transitions to get her more used to sleeping through them instead of waking at them.  But more often she'd wake to a certain degree and I'd have to calm her back to sleep,  At night though, she'd have an initial wake then mostly sleep through (unless I'm remembering wrong??).  I'm also a big proponent of keeping nursing and sleeping disassociated from each other, so I wouldn't nurse back to sleep at those waking times.

After a few months of this, without really any improvement, I realized that "I" was her crutch and was the cause of her not being able to stay asleep.  So much as I disliked the idea, we started to sleep train her by letting her cry it out.  Yes, I said it, that's what we did.  I never did have the heart to go very long though, so mostly it was to try and communicate to her that she needed to try and figure it out some on her own, but that I was there for her.  And you know what?  She started sleeping longer on her own after a relatively short time, like less than a week.  After that, she was taking 1-1.5 hr long naps and on most nights (if no teething) she'd sleep for 8 hr stretches before waking for her morning nurse.

So, maybe consider that you're making your baby too dependant on you for staying asleep?  Just a thought.