5am and wanting to be up for the day

My DS sometimes wakes at 5am and seems to be ready for the day. We leave him to talk to himself until he starts to get grizzly which is usually around 6/6.30am. But if he doesn't go back to sleep (which is usually the case) he is then by tired by 7.30/8am. And then the whole day just seems all mucked up since if I put him down at 8am he may sleep for an hour, so then his next nap might be around lunchtime until about 2pm. He then starts rubbing his eyes around 4pm but there is no way that I can get him to take a short nap at that time.
He goes to bed at about 6.30pm as he is so tired by then since having been up for about 4 hours.

He doesn't feed during the night and he can self settle well. I just don't quite know what to do with these early wakings. I really don't like seeing him get so tired. Does anyone have any advice??

TIA

And then we will move onto the next thing to figure out

We might have to invest in some darker curtains as we have light coloured ones in his room, though due to day light savings its darker at the mo but that is not going to last.

He finally went to sleep at 8.30am this morning after me feeding him and trying to get him to go back to bed straight away (don't know if thats a good thing for me to be doing or not??) and then giving him breakfast as he was not going to sleep.

He seems to only want to have 2 naps a day, no matter how early he wakes and how tired he is, 2 naps a day is it!

My DS has also been waking the last few days at 5am, which is fine as I'm usually up getting ready for the gym.  So usually I just give him a quick nappy change/100mls of milk then back to bed and he'll usually go down until after DH shower, so 6:45am'ish.  He'll just chat happily to himself until just after 7am. 

 

Can you try doing the same above? 

I used to get this a lot at this age. Its very tricky, the trick is to avoid the morning nap being too early, which is hard when they are tired. The good news is that at 14 months with one sleep it mostly has sorted itself, unless teeth or sick. Good luck its a tricky problem.

Sleepstore have some great advoce on this.

We had a similar type problem with early mornings and day sleeps, the daylight savings change seems to have helped, however I've also heard that having the first sleep too early is why they seem to wake early in the morning!!!!

We have moved the first sleep til around 9 - 9.30am then down for another one around 12 - 1pm and a third at around 3 - 4pm. Seems to be working at the moment but will probably change again.

It is hard to keep them up first thing in the morning if they are tired and grumpy until you get to the first sleep time but it may be worth a try.

I can only suggest trying different day nap times and see how it goes!