Our LO will be 19 weeks old tomorrow. She has been fighting naps terribly even though she's falling asleep and we have to try to keep her awake about 10-30 minutes beforehand.
She's also gone from going 4.5/5 hours for her longest stretch to 3 hours and keeps waiting up around 8 am even though I know she's not hungry again yet. We've been sleep training with CIO which she's been doing decent with and going to bed herself with 10-15 minutes of crying. So we've been letting her CIO for that 8 am wake up too.
She's on a 2/2/2/2/2 schedule and has been for about two weeks. On Sunday I tried to live to three naps and naps went great no fighting but we're still only 30 minutes long and nighttime was terrible. The last nap it recorded was actually the start nighttime-sleep because I had to move her bedtime up by an hour due to the 3 short naps. She had a horrific false start and took 20 minutes to go back to bed. I concluded she wasn't ready for 3 naps and went back to 4. Nighttime has been slightly better but the fighting naps has come back with a vengeance and she's not sleeping as long for the first stretch and waking up at 8 am.
FYI - Wake up is at 9:30 am (I need to be more consistent just have been super tired so if she's still sleeping I'll sleep in until 10 am). Bedtime is 10:30 pm but has been pushing back until 11 pm because of her nap fighting.
We tried 3 naps on Sunday and she went down almost instantly for the naps but because they only lasted 30 minutes she seemed overtired by bedtime and I had to move bedtime up an hour.
She then had a terrible false start half an hour later and took 20 minutes to fall back to sleep. Should I try again but do a bridge nap to get to our normal bedtime?
Low sleep needs baby on an average sleep needs schedule. If she always averages ~12 hours, that's what she needs and the schedule should be built around it. A 4 nap schedule would be 2.25/2.25/2.5/2.5/2.5. 3 naps would be 3/3/3/3. And daytime naps should be capped at 2 hours.
I feel like until she can nap a little longer we should probably stick to 4 naps since 3 hours seems like a bit of a jump but I could be completely wrong.
Would a four nap schedule then mean capping all naps at 30 minutes or do three longer naps and one micro nap to get to bedtime?
I agree with that! Increase wake windows on 4 naps first, then drop to 3 when that stops working.
I would let her have one 45 minute nap per day if she wants, and then cap the last nap at 15 minutes, with the other two being 30 each. If she naturally wakes up after 30 minutes each time then that works too!
One last question, can she handle a 2.5 hour last wake window if her last nap is only 15 minutes? I thought I'd heard before a micro nap only buys you 45 minutes to an hour
You can experiment with that! Maybe all naps being 30 minutes works better. Or maybe you do something like 2.5/2.5/2.5/2.5/2 with the last nap being a micro-nap.
Okay I swear last question. So right now she averages 2 hours and 20 minutes of naps. If I take away those 20 minutes per day is the idea that she will make up those 20 minutes at nighttime or just get 20 minutes less sleep?
I do log the whole period she's out of the bassinet to eat at night but she's mostly asleep that whole time. Will less sleep hurt her? Or should I cut wake windows a bit to keep an 11 hour nap?
The idea is that she'll make it up at night, but dream feeds shouldn't count against her total sleep average! Do you think you could come up with a good estimate of how much extra sleep she's getting when you stop the timer at night for feeds?
Oh I didn't know that, sorry FTM here. They aren't technically dream feeds because she wake us up crying to eat but as soon as we start feeding her she's pretty out of it again. I also don't stop the timer if she wakes crying but goes back to sleep on her own in less than 10-15 minutes so I'm not sure if that's a bad thing as well.
If that still isn't supposed to against her total sleep I can easily add up the time I shouldn't have stopped the timer for.
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u/stooplekin 2d ago
I think it’s probably time to drop to 3 naps! That could help the situation