L., Stupidly, I am up at a late hour writing you a note, when I should be asleep since my son also is an tremendously early riser...For 3 weeks, he's been getting up at 4 for the day. He's almost 2, so he's been in a toddler bed and can just get up and rouse the whole house. It's truly awful, I also work and we have a 9 month old who is still waking in the night. When everyone in our house is sleep deprived, everyone is on edge and our son misbehaves and we don't respond the way we should. So that's the first part of my response, that you're not alone.
The second part is hopefully more helpful. I believe my son needs more than 8 hours of sleep a night (what he has been getting). I think he needs 10-11 at night, and then his nap. This is where he functions best. Your daughter may need 14 or so hours total in a day. Definitely transition your daughter down to 1 nap a day. It's going to be hard at first, probably for 6 or 8 weeks, to be honest. Our son started the transition at daycare around 13 months, but at home on weekends he would still take 2 naps until about 17 months, to stay caught up on sleep. After that, his naps improved drastically and he consistently gets 1.5 to 2 hours in the early afternoon. You'll have to start in mid-morning to transition to one nap, and work your way toward a more ideal time (for us, it's 12:30 or 1pm).
It's hard to let your kids cry when they might wake someone up, especially if it's a neighbor who could retaliate when your kid is sleeping! Also, the older your child is, the longer they can hold out and scream, so probably this technique will end up a last resort for you, if you get to that point...One thing we did with success was when our son was 19 months and waking too early (we go through cycles), I said I had tried adjusting his bedtime, but a friend told me I hadn't given it enough of a chance to say it didn't work. I was so glad she suggested I try a 7pm bedtime for a week to see if that worked - it did! Fixed our problem! (until the next thing came along). So perhaps you need to stick with an earlier or later bedtime for a week to see if a new pattern takes hold? Honestly, I think 7pm is too late for her age. We were still putting our son to bed at 6:30 and when he transitioned to 1 nap, sometimes it was even earlier. Hard if you're working all day, to have such an early bedtime, but the payoff COULD be that you're not being woken at a ridiculous hour.
OK so I could go on and on about this topic. Ultimately, once we adjusted the bedtime later, things were great for a few months, and then we had to take our son out of his crib. He was AWESOME in the toddler bed, so happy and great sleep, utnil 10 or so weeks passed by and it became too much freedom for him. We did the whole Super Nanny thing of taking him back to bed 400 times a night, but after 3 weeks of doing this without a single improvement, no response to rewards, etc. (he's not even 2 so I wouldn't expect him to understand very well), and waking at 4 EVERY DAY, we finally decided to take a leap of parental faith and we put him back in the crib. We've also tried rearranging his room, adding more furniture to "cozy it up", full belly before bed, etc. Have you given your daughter a pillow yet? Our son was THRILLED when we gave him a real pillow at 15 months.
So those are my thoughts. My son is an early riser, period. But he needs to sleep until at least 5:45 a.m., in order to get his full night of sleep. And honestly, I am desperate for sleep. Every minute counts!! I hope you can fix this early wake up thing! Message me if you want more rambling about what we've tried. I would love to know what worked, when you do fix it. And best of luck!
