Help with three month old chronic short napping!

[beave91885]

Hi!  Let me start by saying that I'm buying the Baby Whisperer books for every baby shower I ever go to!  I have gone from feeding every 1.5-2 hours, sleeping 20-30 minutes only on me, and up until 2am with several night wakings to a much happier baby who eats every three hours, naps (kind of) in her cradle, and sleeps 11 hours at night with no feeding in just a couple of weeks!  There is hope!  My DD is 14 weeks (she was three months on the 24th of January) and she's on a three hour EASY.  The biggest issue that I'm having is the length of her naps.  She is finally going down in her cradle - I can actually put her down awake and she's getting much better at putting herself to sleep by herself.  However, she is waking at 30 minutes every time!  I work realllly hard to extend them but sometimes it can take 20-30 minutes so it's taking up at least a third of her nap time to resettle and then I end up having to wake her up to eat!  I find this odd because she can sleep 11 hours at night and she often wakes up between 5-6am but she is able to settle herself. Any advice?  Here is my average EASY:

Wake at 9am
E 9:15am (she's strictly breastfed with one bottle of breastmilk a day)
S 10:40am - noon with waking at 11:10am and trouble resettling. I ended up picking her up and letting her sleep on me for 20 minutes because she was SOOO worked up at 11:40 and I wanted her to get at least a little more sleep

E 12:10pm
S 1:35pm-3:35pm - she woke for quite a bit during this nap so I let her sleep a little longer than usual to catch up and ended up having to wake her

E 3:40pm
S 4:55pm-6:30pm with waking at 5:25pm - had VERY hard time resettling her and again had her sleep on me for 20 minutes at the end of the nap because she was sooo worked up

E 6:30pm
S 7:20pm-7:40pm on me for her catnap because I have a hard time getting her to sleep at this time

E 8:30pm (she was realllly hungry so I ended up feeding her a little earlier than normal)
S 9:15pm-9:30pm,  she filled her diaper so she woke up and I had to change her, then she fussed a bit so I fed her again at 10pm.  She went back to sleep at 10:45pm and slept until 8:30am (she stirred at 5am but was able to get herself back to sleep).

I have really made a lot of progress with her in a couple of weeks but I can't figure out this nap issue!  Please help!

Mary

[anna*]

Hi Mary!! It's fantastic to hear that she's doing so well! I wonder if the disturbed naps are from a bit of overtiredness, she may be having a bit more A time than she can handle. 30 mins wake-ups are a classic sign of OT.

At 3 months old, most can handle just about 1hr 20-30mins MAXIMUM, and often the first A time of the day needs to be shorter than the rest. So from a 9am wake up she'd need to be going down for her first nap by about 10.15. Then if she takes a longer nap (1.5hrs plus) she should be able to hand 1hr 20-30 mins for the rest of the day.

Remember, if she takes short naps, the next A time needs to be kept shorter to compensate.

Just one more observation, your day runs 9-9pm? I know you know this, but as she gets older her bedtime will move later, so bear that in mind!

Hope something here is helpful,

anna
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[beave91885]

Anna,

Thank you for your quick response.  I will try to cut down her A times - I did try this yesterday afternoon but I'm pretty sure it made no difference because at that point in the day she was so OT from poor earlier naps.  She has been sleeping for 1.5 hours at this point because I was able to extend her by putting my hand on her back.

Another question - would W2S work in this instance?

About the bedtime issue - I'm aiming at 8pm-8am because if we do 7pm-7am my DH wouldn't see her during the week because of his work schedule.  We're taking that slowly though - a few weeks ago she was up until 3am and then consistently up until midnight so we've made progress!

Thanks again,

Mary

[anna*]

You could try W2S but my hunch is that this is about getting the A times right as an OT baby will never nap well. The other thing you could try is going in to her at 20 mins and laying a hand on her back and staying with her right past the 30 and 45 mins mark, so as to ease her into the next sleep cycle. Sounds like you're doing great at extending her naps! Let us know how the shorter A times work out.

anna
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