New mom please heeellpp!!

[leamonzgirl]

Hi I am nw mom and bave a 3 11/2 yr old son. My LO has trouble sitting content by himself during day so we must entertain him all day, playing, talking, swing, bouncy, etc. Recently he was waking up at 9:30am and going to sleep at 9:30pm. He wld nap around noon until abt 5 pmpm and he wld go to sleep with rocking and sleep well through the night.

Now for the past few days he only takes 30 minutes naps abt 2 day. He wants to be held throughout the nap. Whn I put him down he waks up abt 10 min later, I shake his body a little to fall back asleep and then he may wake up 10 min later again and the process continues. He has been getting no more than 80 minutes of sleep throughout the entire day. Night time has become hell. It took him an hour and a half to fall asleep which was at 10:30 last night.

Advice please! Maye I should use the EASY method with more naps? But I can't even get him to stay sleep

[Papaya]

Hi, welcome to the boards

Sorry, I'm not sure how old your LO is?

[leamonzgirl]

I'm so sorry, my son is 3 1/2 months

[Papaya]

Oh ok, I thought he must be older

Your LO must be really OT hun, if he's not napping during the day. That's why he wakes after 10 mins or so, and why it's taking him so long to fall asleep at night too - he's too tired to fall into a deep sleep! So let's try to get him started on an age-appropriate routine that will help him get some sleep.

How familiar are you with the basic idea of EASY? Have you read any of the Baby Whisperer books? Do you follow the E(at) A(activity) S(leep) order of things so far?

Here are a few links that might help you get started.
http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=186622.0
http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=63534.0
http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=84884.0

From that last link you'll see that the average awake time for this age is only about 1hr30. 'A time' means eyes open to eyes closed - so from the time he wakes, until he is next asleep for his nap. Some babies need a little more, but if he stays awake much more than this he will find it very hard to get to sleep.

Now is a good age to start aiming for your LO to be able to fall asleep in his cot on his own. I know from experience how tiring it is when your LO will only nap in your arms!!!  However, first I would try to get him caught up on sleep as it's very hard to sleep train an OT baby. For the next few days, I would be trying to get him to sleep between 1hr20 and 1hr30 A time, however you can (holding, rocking, if you have to) and try to get some good naps. This should help your nights as well. Once he gets caught up, you will probably find that he can handle staying awake a little bit longer, and you can then work on the independent sleep using shush-pat http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=26672.0

This is a lot of info What do you think?

I'm also going to move this over to the EASY forum as you'll get more experienced eyes on it there, but am happy to stick around and answer any more questions you have

[Ima shel Alon]

I only have one more thing to add, because Nuala really said it all and gave you good advice.

My LO has trouble sitting content by himself during day so we must entertain him all day, playing, talking, swing, bouncy, etc.

My only concern is about this, because on top of being extremely OT it sounds like he is OS as well. At this age you really don't need to do much with them. Have a look here: http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=52863.0 and here http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=52864.0 he is somewhere in between the ages, so I would go more for the softer activities. It could be that his unhappiness is due to OS and OT and not boredom. 

[leamonzgirl]

Wow thank u so much. I tried the EASY method and he did great on it thse last two days. It is not drown to the very minute but he did great! It was wonderful. He also went to sleep easier. The one thing was since he was a little off with times he woke up around 7:30 from a 2 hour nap. He did get tired a bit before 9 and he wa asleep at 9:30. I am trying to move his bed time up a little.

I will work on the OS too. We really do play with him a lot because he cries in his bouncer sometimes. So we pick him up to play. I'm beginning to think its because he was tired.
Once we get his sleep thing down we can work on him sitting in his Carseat ha!  But I don't even want to go anywhere because I want to get this schedule down with nothing interrupting it.

[Ima shel Alon]

That sounds like a good progress to me! I am sure he will do good on EASY if he is not OT.