What to Do When Baby’s Awake Time Is Before Feedings

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Sometimes baby wakes up before feeding time. What do you do in this case? Do you feed right away to keep the eat/wake/sleep pattern, or do you wait to keep the correct length of time between feeds?

Mom holding baby up and kissing baby

Eat, wake, sleep. Repeat. 

That is the pattern we all have in our heads. 

Sometimes, however, that little cutie of yours doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo and wakes up early from a nap. Too early for it to be time to eat already. Of course the first thing you check when you have a short nap going on is make sure you don’t have a growth spurt or hunger happening. You try to feed the baby. 

For the purposes of this post, I am going to assume you have checked the hunger possibility and have been working to try to figure out why the short naps are happening. You always want to feed a hungry baby, and if your baby is hungry, the only thing that will stop your baby from continuing to wake early will be to feed your baby. Nothing else will solve it. There are also many, many reasons your baby can be waking early, so you need to explore those to try to stop the early waking.

In the meantime, between now and having the issue resolved and baby back to taking long enough naps, you need to know what to do with baby! Here are three options:

  1. Do you feed baby right away? Keep that eat, wake, sleep routine in place? 
  2. Do you play with baby first, disrupting that pattern, and then feed? Is the length of time between feedings more important than the pattern?
  3. Do you hybrid? Play for a bit, feed sooner than you ideally would have, then play a bit more, then back to nap?

The answer is that you could do any one of those three options. I have done all three of those over the course of my parenting life. Let’s talk about each one.

Awake Time Before Feeds Graphic

Feed Right Away, Stay on Routine

If the baby is hungry, at least hungry enough to eat, I feed right away, then continue on my pattern. If the baby will, I then let the remaining naps in the day be longer throughout the day. So if baby woke up an hour early for one feeding, I would feed, play, and then do nap. I would let a normally two hour nap go 2.5 hours, then let future naps go longer, also, to try to get back on track and end the day on our normal bedtime. 

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Play First, Stay on Feeding Schedule

Baby might not be hungry enough to eat upon waking. If this is the case, and you can’t rock your baby to sleep or use a swing to get back to sleep, then you will have no choice but to have your playtime first, then eat. 

If you go this route, be careful when you do feed that baby doesn’t fall asleep while eating. Let me say it again. Do not let your baby fall asleep while eating! If a baby falls asleep while eating, there is a good chance the baby didn’t get enough food and will wake up early again, but this time for hunger. You also are letting your baby take a power nap, which will then mean your baby is not tired enough for the next nap time and your sleep troubles will continue.

>>>Read: Sleep Pressure for Babies

Also, a high-level goal is for the baby to learn to fall asleep independently. If this is a random, one-time situation, then you will be fine if your baby falls asleep eating (taking out the issue of not getting enough food). If this becomes a norm for a while, though, you want to be cautious of what new habits you might be forming. 

Hybrid, Do a Little of Both

Doing a hybrid is a great option for extending the time between feedings while avoiding a situation of your baby falling asleep while eating. 

Conclusion

If your baby is waking early, any one of these solutions is a great way to handle the situation while you troubleshoot and try to get the short naps solved. Any one works, find what works best for you right now. 

Do you still have questions? Leave them in the comments below!

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This post first appeared on this blog in March 2017

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