Hi,
Am really hoping you guys can help as am losing hope that I can solve my LO's issue with 45 minute naps!
Over the last month we've been moving over to the 4 hour EASY routine as I noticed that his naps were getting shorter, he was starting to wake during the night (whereas before, he's always been really good at resettling himself at night if he wakes) and he was waking up early in the mornings. So we started extending A times and moving out feeds to drop one. Am now on 4 hour EASY and he doesn't seem to be missing the extra feed from the daytime.
Our aim is to hit the following times for EASY:
E: 7am
A: 7.30am
S: 9 - 11am
E: 11am
A: 11:30am
S: 1-3pm
E: 3pm
A: 3.30pm
S: He doesn't often like to sleep at this time so we only get a catnap out of him 50% of the time and it is usually a bit of a struggle.
Bath, feed and bed by 7.30pm. He goes to bed awake and falls asleep independently most of the time. Sometimes I need to go in and resettle him if he is very fussy but generally he is good about going to sleep and will sleep through to 7am the next morning with a DF at 10.30pm.
Daytime naps have always been a struggle and having used PU/PD we are now at the point where he will go down for the first two naps of the day most of the time with a little fussing/crying but can soothe himself to sleep. It takes him 10 minutes to fall asleep, so we make sure that he is in his cot 10 minutes before we want his S time to start.
He has been waking early from naps since Christmas (possibly before even, but can't remember. All blurs into one!). We used to get a mixture of short and long naps, and he has shown that he can do 2hr+ naps at various points, but I can't seem to pinpoint what it was that I did which meant he took the longer nap and got through the transition ok. I've been keeping a log but no obvious patterns are emerging.
Have tried WTS, HTTJ. PU/PD to try and extend naps but apart from working the first or second time, they've not worked consistently and I have given each a good week or so trying with each nap. PU/PD *after a nap* is just a nightmare and gets him so wound up that I can't bring myself to do it to put him back to sleep anymore. It has only ever worked once and the other times it just results in an even crankier baby than when he first woke up. When he wakes, he sometimes makes happy noises and then cries if we don't go in to get him within 10 minutes, and other times he wakes with frantic crying. On the latter occasions, he is then really cranky until his next feed and doesn't generally like being put down at all, so I end up having to carry him around.
So...is this a routine issue as obviously when he wakes after only 45 minutes into a nap, we have a lot of time before his next feed and so the A times are all over the place...or is it that he doesn't need that much sleep since he can be absolutely fine sometimes and not cranky? I'm losing the will here as want him to have decent naps during the day, as much for him as for me! I used to wait for his sleepy cues before putting him down but as I've been extending his A times to see if it was UT, I now don't know what sleep cues to follow and which to ignore. Don't know if I've rushed the extension of the A times as in the mornings, I used to put him down by 8.20am and that would more often than not result in a nice long nap. But because they weren't consistent and were getting shorter, I moved to the 4 hour.
So confused - please help! Hope I've given enough info, let me know if you need to know anything else. Sorry if this is a little rambly!
