9 week old only taking short naps - v.grumpy! help?

[xmoonbeamx]

My ds2 is 9 weeks on saturday and has been taking short naps for a couple of weeks now. He usually naps between 45mins-1 hour, which means he can only stay awake an hour including feed, so it's really hard to follow EASY. He's incredibly grumpy in that time too, and needs to be held whihc means i can get nothing done and my 3year old doesnt get much time with me. Obviously he is not getting enough sleep in the day time, but i'm really not sure how to extend his naps. He wont take a paci anymore, he hates pat/shh, the only thing that consoles him is picking him up, and of course its impossible to put him back down then. We have tried white noise, no luck.

Any ideas appreciated... or is it just a case of hoping he grows out of it?
Incidentally, his night time sleep isnt too bad. He has a bath at 6 ish, and then goes down at around 7pm, until 10.30pm when we wake him for a feed, he then goes down at 11.30pm until about 4/5am feeds, then sleeps until 7/8am.




Help!

Lucy x

[Taylor's Mommy]

Hi there,
Well you have a couple of options for dealing with the 45minute naps:

1. Wait for him to grow out of it, and yes, most do grow out of it between 4-6 months!
2. Try to tweak his routine by either extending or decreasing A time slightly
3. Try W2S to extend the naps

Because of when they started (around 7 weeks), it sounds like they are probably developmental.  This means that right now he is sorting out his night time sleep (which is great because it means you get some more rest at night), and he won't start sorting out his daytime sleep for another  month or so.  my dd started the short naps the day she turned 7 weeks old and they went away when she was about 14 weeks old.

In the meantime you can try to extend them (the first 2 naps are the easiest to extend BTW), with wake to sleep so that you don't end up with such a grumpy baby by the end of the day.

I notice that our announcements are gone, so if you have specific Q's about wake to sleep, please let me know, and of course any other questions that you may have!

Thanks