Lesorl -
Okay here's how we started off. Bear with me with because chances are this will be a novel, so sorry in advance.
DD started making the shift about a month and a half ago, where she’d take a morning nap and then refuse everything else. After reading every 2-1 post I could find I felt like we had to have an afternoon nap to get her through. Anyways, I first cut her am nap to 45 minutes, which worked for about 2 weeks to still give me something that resembled a pm nap. Then she would wake on her own at 45 minutes in the am and still refuse her pm nap. So I tried to shift her A time further in the am, hoping for a longer am nap and then try a pm catnap and ended up with a baby that would wake from her 11:30 nap at 45 minutes and refuse any other nap. So I tried 4.5 hours from there putting her to bed. It would work for a few days but then she’d catch up and start waking at 4:30 am. Which, as you well know, ruled out making it to 11:30 for her nap. So I started playing with A times after her nap wakeup and found she could handle 5 hours. She continued to sleep 11.5 – 12 hours at night (which she has for a long time) and then give me an hour nap. Then that started to backfire – again, she’d catch up on sleep and start waking early again. So I finally just bit the bullet and realized we were all over the place with wake times, nap times and bed times – basically her body was so confused about what happened when. So I decided to set a clock time for wake up, nap and bedtime – heck, it couldn’t get much worse than where we were and I figured if we were going to fight OT that maybe we could fix it in the right direction, so to speak, towards the ideal schedule. So I figured out what would work best for our schedule (with her activities – playgroup, music class and swimming) and with DH being able to see her at least for 20 minutes a day and came up with this:
6:30 -7 – wake
12 – nap
7- bedtime
Being that our ideal would be 5 to 5.5 hours awake time before the nap, 2 hour nap, and then 5 hours after nap. I knew it was going to be rough going into it, and that even though I was exhausted beforehand that this wouldn’t last forever. I also operated on the belief from reading Weissbluth and others that a nap of an hour is restorative so that often if wasn’t likely they’d go back to sleep if they fully awoke at that point.
For the first 2 days, she was barely making it to noon as she had awoken so early and then her nap was all of about 30-45 minutes. If she woke earlier than an hour I would do everything to extend, WIPDWO (and on 2 occasions I nursed her back to sleep – APOP, which really didn’t help imo) to an hour. She never went back to sleep during those attempts. I then held her up for those two days until 6:00. If she woke before 6 or had NW, I would WIPDWO until 6. On days 3-5 she was going down for an hour for her nap – and I mean an hour to the second, and I was pushing her bedtime to 6:30. The afternoons were NOT easy but we persevered. On Monday, she got up at 6:45 am, went down for an hour at noon and woke an hour later. It was rough but I kept her up and put her down at 7pm. I heard her wake at 6:00 on Monday morning, did one WIPDWO, because I knew she needed to sleep to catch up and then woke her at 7. She still needs quiet time at her old naptime of 10, so we have been doing a snack and snuggles with mommy to tide her over, but she made it and I put her down at 11:50. She talked for a bit and then went to sleep. I even put a small space heater in her room for background noise. I did hear her at the hour mark but amazingly she rolled over and went back to sleep for another 42 minutes. Can I just tell you what a joy she was after a good nap? So I then held her out till 7 pm for bed and she woke at 6:45 this morning without so much as a sound during the night. She also seemed much better equipped this am to handle the 5 hours of awake time. She’s now down for her nap and is at the hour mark, so I am hoping we will make it further today. I am just happy with anything over an hour at this point. I promised myself that come hell or high water we were going to stick with the clock times this entire week and not do any AP, because all I do when I do that is make her more confused. She needs me to teach her how to do this thing, so to speak.
Now, this is a risky prospect in my opinion, because you do risk OT, but nothing else was moving us in the right direction. It also takes drawing up all the emotional reserves you have because when they only sleep for 45 minutes its hard to keep them engaged and deal with my little crankypants to get to the “clockset” bedtime, but I figured it was worth it if we came out on the other side in a better place. I’ll let you know in a bit how today’s nap turned out.
Hang in there, I know your frustration well – I have struggled with PTSD/PPD from a rough pregnancy so this on top of it made it really hard for me to enjoy my dd. But, just having ONE good day yesterday – made it ALL worthwhile.
