Difficulties with Naps for 3.5 month old - Please Help

[clarabella]

Hello everyone. I haven't posted on here for many many moons and now, with baby number 2 in our lives, I find need of your wisdom and solace once again

So, our delightful Eliza Rose was born back in September. Gorgeous, placid, sunny baba. Then came the dairy allergy/reflux. So, we're getting that under control now. Ace. Whilst the worst of that happened, our Eliza spent most of her naps upright in a sling as she was in a lot of pain lying flat and thwarted our efforts to elevate her mattress by consistently wriggling onto the flat bit..

We're now on just about a 4 hour feed schedule. Her nights are completely fine most of the time. I feed whenever i can lying down, which really seems to help but takes an age and is not always practical with a 4.5 year old big sister. So sometimes feeding during the day goes wrong. Sometimes I eat something that aggravates her system.

Couple of issues.1) She's waking around 6am for a feed. Which often takes a long time - till 7 or quarter past. She's often sort of dozing through this. So should I still start counting from 6 am or guesstimate when her wake time was?

I'm struggling with naps! She sleeps beautifully in a sling but this is not practical for me all the time and is already giving me backache and the like. And I can't cuddle the big sister nor sit with her to do school work etc. So Eliza has to do the cot thing in the day.

2) I'm not always certain I read her cues right (it's been a long time since our first was a wee baba!) and I think I'm often putting her to bed overtired. SHould I start wind down straight from that first yawn? 

ooh soory, there are 3 issues

3) is a biggie - I can't, really really can't, get her to sleep more than 40 minutes in one go. And that's with staying with her to replace a dummy at 20 or 30 minutes. Or doing shhhhing. Or putting my hand on her. etc. I have had success in getting her to go back to sleep but it can take at least 30 minutes...

Advice/general empathy vibes realyl really welcome!!

Schedule is generally something like this (the 6am feed is new and combines with the start of term so not quite figured out how to do this one..)

6am: Awake/feed
7.15 finish feed
8.30am pram to school
9am - bed
11am - feed
1pm - bed
3pm - feed
5pm - snooze in car seat in kitchen
6.30 - get ready for bed/ start feed.
7.30 or so - bed

I appreciate from writing down the morning bit is a nightmare but not quite sure how to make this work! This is a new development as previously she was feeding say around 4am and then going back to sleep till 7.30am. Plus we obviously had the gorgeously long snoozes in the sling.

Think this may be slightly incoherently put together. Not thinking quite straight in the midst of it all 

[Layla]

Hi there,

Sorry your post has been missed. How are you going?

At this age, short naps could be developmental. Looking at your routine, she may be awake for too long and if she's overtired, it will be much harder to resettle her. I used to leave dd3 in the cot if she woke early (an extra 15mins if she only slept 45) and sometimes she would put herself back to sleep and if she didn't, I would move on with our day. You might also have a prop issue/paci, if you find she needs it to get back to sleep. I wonder if you would be willing to ditch the paci and sleep train so that she doesn't rely on it to fall asleep

[clarabella]

Hi Layla, Thanks for replying.

We had a good few days last week - I extended her A time to nearly 2 hours. It seemed to work. Then we had a horrific weekend and I accidentally ate some dairy.... which means Eliza's tummy is all stressed out. So today she's only sleeping for 45 minutes before waking up screaming.. not cool. I suspect she's overtired from a horrid weekend as well. Not sure where to start really! Tomorrow is another day!