Jude has always been a fairly decent sleeper. In the beginning, I woke him up every two and half hours to nurse if he hadn’t woken up on his own. We slowly transitioned to letting him go three, then four hours between feedings, and finally (after my milk supply was well-established), we stopped waking him up to eat and let him stir on his own.
Up until about a month ago, Jude was still waking three or four times a night. It never took much to get him back to sleep-just a boob in the mouth and he was good to go. Four weeks ago, that all changed. Suddenly he was sleeping from 8pm to 5am without waking. At all. So, at 5am he would wake up, I would nurse him back to sleep, and he would wake up for the day at around 6:30am or 7am. It was amazing. I felt so alive during the days…human, almost. I had had more than two years of not getting more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep at a time. The past few weeks I was getting seven hours or more at a clip. It was bliss. And if I had been smart, I would have rapped my knuckles on my kitchen table every morning.
Over the past few nights, Jude’s sleep patterns have shifted again. He’s still going to bed at around 8pm, and luckily, he’s still sleeping pretty much straight through until around 4am. The tough part is that at 4am, he’s AWAKE. I’ve been successful at getting him back to sleep until about 5am, but after that, though he lies in bed with Josh and me, he doesn’t actually sleep. As soon six o’clock rolls around, he’s pretty much up and at ‘em for the day. And really, that wouldn’t be a bad time for him to wake up, if he had actually been sleeping until then. But since he has really been up for an extra hour by that point, well, lets just say that I’ve had one really tired boy on my hands for the past few days.
I’m not sure what’s throwing him off. Honestly, this is the first time he’s done this type of thing with any consistency. He has woken up at 5am on occasion (maybe three or four times outside of this past week), but he has almost always slept until (at least) six in the morning. Losing that extra hour has been hard on all three of us.
Thoughts? Is there some major developmental stuff that happens at 28+ months of age that could be causing his sleep pattern to go all wonky? Is anybody out there? Help!
I was talking (complaining, really) to my dad about Grace’s sudden shift in her sleeping patterns, and he said that when I was around three I used to wake up every single night around 3, cry for a while, and then go back to sleep after they came and comforted me. He said my sister had something similar when she was around the same age, so it’s entirely possible that it is normal, even common, for kids around this age to shift their sleep patterns. Dad said it eventually went away with us on its own, so hopefully eventually Jude will regulate himself!