My son is 17 weeks. He is the KING of the 45 minute nap. He sleeps great at night. He's down at 7:30 and sometimes will sleep straight through til 7am, other times he's up for a quick 10 minute feed around 5am and then goes back to sleep til 7:30.
From reading message boards and talking with friends, I've realized the 45 minute nap is a VERY common thing at this age. My question is, is there ANYTHING I can do to break this??
Right now he's on a 3 hour feeding schedule. I know he could go 4, but it's tricky since he doesn't nap for very long. Even with the 3 hour schedule, I run into him needing to eat and sleep at the same time in the afternoon.
Going to sleep isn't a problem for him. I put him down awake in his crib with a lovie(for both naps and at bedtime) and usually he's out within a few minutes without even a peep. Sometimes he will fuss a little, but it's never more than 5 minutes. He sleeps with white noise in his room. We keep the room pitch black.
I feel like he's got the whole going to sleep thing down. I give him the right environment to sleep in, yet he WILL NOT sleep for longer than 45 minutes during the day. Occasionally he'll give me an hour, but I'm pretty sure he's waking prior to that and just waiting before he starts crying. Yes, he does wake up happy from these little naps, but he'll give me an hour and a half max before he's ready for the next one.
Right now, he's waking for the day between 7-7:30 and going down for his first nap somewhere between 8:45-9:15. I've tried keeping him up a full 2 hours, I've tried putting him down after 1 hour...both result in a 45 minute nap. The rest of the day, he's usually going down for a nap 1.5 hours after waking from the previous one with increasing fussiness between naps as the day progresses. By the time the evening gets here he usually takes a 20-30 minute catnap while one of us is holding him before bedtime, otherwise, he just screams. He's been consistently taking 4 45 minute naps each day yet we're still counting down the minutes until we can start his bath every evening so we can start getting him ready for bed. I'd love for him to combine these into 2 good naps and maybe a catnap and move him to a 4 hour feeding schedule, but I have no idea where to start.
TIA.
