Re: Please help - early waking, 3/2 nap transition?

[zissi]

hi there,

Im following this post as I am having similar problems with my DD who is 8 months old now. Layla, I find your advice great and you have been helpful in the past. we too get earlier and earlier wake ups in the morning because we need to have early BT almost every day due to short naps. good naps for my DD are 1h15m. her current A time is 3h15m. I have tried pushing it over several days to shift the whole day back but this only results in OT naps of 35 mins. so I just reverted back to my A time of 3h15m. even with my good naps she still wont make it to a later backtime. we too find that her last A time before BT is much shorter, she just doesnt seem to be able to handle longer A time the more the day goes on. some days we still need a cat nap and TBH it doesnt seem to make a different in terms nightwakings. some nights she sleeps through without a single waking and other nights she wakes once or twice and cries or chats. again I cant see any correlation to her naps. any other advice what I could do instead to shift the day later and get hopefully that way later WU? @emami, it sounds like a good advice to APOP short naps and I will try that. I do it currently with early WU by feeding her and it usually works. this morning she went back to sleep till 7.35am.
thanks fran

[Layla]

Hi Fran,

What time does she generally wake up? If mine woke anywhere before 6am, I would also do a quick feed and then back to bed. It would work 99% of the time but I must say if the wake up is anywhere from 5.30am onward, it didn't work as well. Still, because I worked on set nap times, I would hold mine off until 9am (or 15mins less if she was very cranky) until morning nap.

When you said you tried pushing it... how much A were you adding and one at a time or all A's across the day. I remember working on one A at a time.

[zissi]

hi layla,

about a months ago she would wake up around 7, then with the early BT this shifted to 6ish and now she often wakes up before that, sometimes around 5. we tried pushing A time in 15 mins increments. for how long would you do this in order to see results? we gave it about 3-4 days and only got OT naps. so therefore we never made any changes to the 2nd nap since she needs to go down even earlier ig the first nap was a short one.
with the set naps, do they work with every baby, also if baby is prone to become OT? and how do I go about it? also in 15 mins increments? and when do I increase again? and from what age can you do set naps? my DD will go to childcare with 10 months and I think they do 2 naps a day, depending on age, so I guess by then she will be on set naps anyway but Im so afraid already that she wont sleep at all or only short naps...
Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
fran

[Layla]

I did set naps with all 3 from around 6 months (dd3 a little younger than that). I worked on one A at a time and would add 15mins every couple of days. My LO did get overtired some days until she got used to it and we did have the yukky 30min naps too and in that case, I would bring the next nap forward by 15mins or so but still tried to stay on schedule. I am not sure if they work on everyone but it made things so much easier and I didn't really have to worry about counting A's. I mean, even on set naps, our A is more or less in line with the av A.

Did you want to post what your last couple of days have looked like?

[zissi]

hi there,
thanks for that. a couple more questions: would you still go on increasing A time if lets say both days you get an OT nap? so lets say I go from 3.15 to 3.30 for 2 days and both days I get short naps, will I go on day 3 to 3.45? or will i try a few more days the 3.30 A time?
currently my DD has an A time of 3.05h since she has a cold. she does good naps so I guess she is more tired due to being ill. I guess thats normal? and with set naps, would you wake the baby in the morning if she happens to sleep longer than her usual wake up time? that obviously doesnt sound appealing to a sleep deprived mum...
thanks again fran

[Layla]

I would probably stay with 3:30A for a few more days. What kind of naps are you getting on 3:15A time?

If she's sick, I wouldn't worry about a routine at all hun, put her down when she's tired and let her sleep. Mine always sleept more when were/are sick so I just let them be and get back into a routine when they're better. Dd3 for example is a little under the weather now (I think she may be teething and has fever) and a few days ago she slept 2hrs in the morning and 2.5hrs in the afternoon and was still tired at her usual bedtime. Once she's better, I'll go back to her routine

With regards to her sleeping in - again, if she's sleeping in because she's sick, I would just leave her. Jenny doesn't usually sleep in and she's awake between 6-6.30am but if not, I have to wake her up in the mornings due to school runs (well not for the past 6 weeks due to school holidays... but otherwise, her afternoon nap needs to end by 3.30pm the latest for me to pick up the girls). On a few occasions I have let her sleep in, I would take her out for a walk in the pram around her nap time and she'll take a short catnap (around 30mins) and then our afternoon nap is more or less the same time it usually is. I guess it depends on how much longer she sleeps in. I know others don't wake their babies and just shift the schedule according to wake up time. Again, I'm in a different boat because of school run