I'm on day 10 of pu/pd sleep training. Although it took him a bit to get settled, night sleep straightened itself out almost immediately. DS went from being swaddled/rocked/bf to sleep and then waking 3-6 times per night to bf back to sleep for 20-90 minutes each time, to sleeping 11.5 hours straight with no wake ups (the first three nights, he woke up once to eat, but has been consistant for the past six nights).
Naps, however, have not gone so well. I think that Zoey over on the pu/pd boards thinks that I am doing the pu/pd technique correctly and something else is preventing him from napping well . . . perhaps his schedule. She suggested I post either here or in the EASY forum, so I thought that I'd start here. I'm new to BW so I'm still having a bit of trouble figuring out what his routine should look like.
Background: He's never been a strong napper. Until he was four months old he napped on my lap or in a sling. Then I started swaddling him for naps and he slept in his cribs, but naps were rarely long. (I had been swaddling him for night sleep all along, but some how thought that swaddling him for day sleep too was bad . . . I don't know what I was thinking.) My efforts to keep on a schedule were always fruitless because his sleep times were so variable, so instead I just tried to put him down when I saw sleepy signs, usually 90 min. to 2 hours after last sleep period. At 5 months he became able to be awake for 2 hours b/t naps most of the time. He was sleeping pretty well at night at this point (just one wake up).
When he was six 1/2 months old I read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. By this time naps were still spotty and night sleep was getting worse. It suggested that babies who had been colicky or extremely fussy early in life often did better with a very short awake time before their first nap up until they were nine months (not sure on the rational)--as short as just an hour. DS had been very fussy as an infant. This book also said that eye rubbing was a sign he was OVERLY tired, while yawning was a sign of the sleep window. We realized that he was eye rubbing by the time he went down for his first nap, so we started putting him down for his first nap when he yawned, about 1.5 hours after waking. For a few weeks this worked very well. He was taking long first naps. Then suddenly all of his naps became quite short and I was very frustrated--night sleep was getting worse all the while.
Enter BW. The pu/pd moderators suggested that he needed more "A" time than I was giving him and that was probably contributing to his short napping. They suggested a routine that stretched his first "A" time to 2.25 hours and set his second at 3 hours. Over the last ten days he's only had three naps that exceeded an hour and only two days on which he slept during both nap periods. Most days his total napping time has been less than half an hour.
When his night sleep straightened out and his napping still didn't, we adjusted his schedule to increase his "A" time to 2.5 hours thinking that now that he was sleeping well at night he could handle more "A" time. We've been doing this for several days now and still no improvement in his napping. Now he's teething so we are taking a break from pu/pd training, but I need to figure out what steps to take next.
Here is our current routine:
6:30 wake and bf
8:00 solids
9:00-10:30 nap
10:30 bf
12:30 solids and bf
1:30- 3:00 or 3:30 nap
6:00 bf
6:30
Here are some things that I've noticed. The first six days that we were doing pu/pd his first nap was scheduled to start at 8:45. From 8:00-8:30 I would take him for a walk in his stroller and the second half of the walk I had to work hard to keep him awake. The exception to this was on day seven when he came back so wide awake that we decided to experiment with adjusting his schedule for longer awake time, which resulted in 25 minute nap after four hours of awake time.
Since using the adjusted schedule above, after we finish solids (which he's still not very excited about) he wants to breast feed. It doesn't make sense to me that he would be hungry since he's having a very long feed upon waking and being offered solids. I was wondering if maybe because I bf him to sleep in the past, his wanting to bf then is actually a sleepy sign? If it is, it is falling at about 8:15, the time he was falling asleep on our walks. Maybe he needs really short "A" time before his first nap . . . but that's what we were doing before we started pu/pd and it wasn't working out well.
On the other hand, maybe he's not even a little bit tired when we start our first nap and so it's just frustrating him to be put in the crib. The only problem with that theory is that when he doesn't nap at all during the first nap at his 10:30 bf he's trying to fall asleep at the breast.
I'm very frustrated and getting a little desperate. I don't know if this post is most appropriate here on the EASY boards, but if anyone has any ideas I would really appreciate them. He seems to be teething right now, so we are taking a little break from the pu/pd nap training, but I need to figure out what to try when it is time to start again.
Thanks and sorry this is so long!
