Extending bed time

Wondering if anyone can help or make a suggestion... how can I extend my son’s bed time?

My 11 week old son has always gone to bed for his night sleep no later than 6pm. While it’s nice that my partner and I can have a few hours to ourselves and an uninterrupted meal, I don’t see how he will ever sleep through the night going to bed this early. Also, going to bed at 6pm means he's up twice for a feed.

The reason for his going to bed this early is that either; he won’t sleep in the afternoon and is overtired and losing it by 5pm; or lately, because he is napping one hour/ up one hour during the day, he does get overtired and grizzly by 5pm. As soon as he starts to lose it, he gets bathed, fed (if he’ll take it) and goes to sleep for approx 6 hours.

I’ve tried putting him down for a nap at 4pm-ish but he won’t have a bar of it – he goes nuts. And we have to start the bath and bed process. Normally, he makes no complaint at the start of his day sleeps.

I haven’t tried dream feeding him as I’m reluctant to unwrap him, un-velcro the safety sleep etc in the middle of his best sleep of the day.

Any suggestions? I'm thinking 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' but I'd love to get a decent night's sleep sometime soon.

Not really sure this will be much use as we did do the dreamfeed...

Basically Oliver would go to bed whenever he had been up for about an hour or so, sometimes that was 6pm and othertimes it was more like 7pm. Then DH would get him up for a feed (he was bottle fed) at about 11pm and then he would go back to sleep until about 3am, another quick feed and back to bed until 6 or 7am. We then just started to bring the dreamfeed back from 11pm until we got it to 9.30pm and then stopped altogether. Oliver now goes to bed anywhere from 6pm to 7pm and wakes at about 6am, sometimes as late as 7am. When we stopped the dreamfeed, he was still waking for the early morning feed, but I just starting trying to get him to go back to sleep instead of having a feed by putting his dummy in his mouth and he very quickly stopped waking for it. He was 4 months when he started to sleep through.

I was able to sleep through until the early morning feed cause DH did the dreamfeed, but if you are BF that is not really an option unless you express.

Whenever I had daytime sleep issues it was because Oliver wasn't getting enough sleep, so I was reasonally strict on the hour turnaround with him, right up until he started sleeping through.

Joel very rarely sleeps btween his 3pm feed and his bed time feed, that is just his up and sometimes grumpy time. He is normally in bed around 7pm and most nights sleeps till 7am.

Both he and Leah didn't do the dreamfeed thing, they would both still wake in the at the same time as usual. We were having one feed around 2am and then he just stretched it out as he got bigger and now goes through. Some babues don't do the dreamfeed thing very well and others do.

Hi,

Have a look at www.thesleepstore.co.nz - they have some great tips on getting the littlies to sleep. I was having problems with bubs getting past the 1st sleep cycle during the day (she is just over 3 months now) and after having a read up on there site we are getting better at the day time sleeping thing. We do the bath routine between 6-7 most nights and then a feed at 11ish and then she sleeps thru till anywhere between 5ish - 7ish. I haven't really done a dreamfeed (yet) as I like her to have a fresh nappy on for the nightime sleep (and every though we wake her she settles back to sleep quickly) and I just let her settle during the night if she wakes, she has been sleeping thru with the odd grizzle for a while now and I have probably in the past month only been up 3 times during the night for a feed - mostly due to her being sick with an ear infection. Hope this helps and good luck.