Having trouble with naps and late evening

[exeon]

Hi all,
8 years ago, we worked with the EASY method with our first daughter and it worked great. The problem is that it's been so long, I don't recall how we made it 

We now have a 7.5 weeks old little one. She is a great baby overall but I would like to start working on a routine. She is a notorious cat napper. She rarely naps more than 30 mins (I'd say 90% of her naps are 30 mins, 5% are 40 to 60 mins and 5% are over 60 mins) but is NEVER EVER grumpy/irritated other than in the late evenings. She also has always slept at least 3 hours at night since week 3ish and have now made 4 or 5 nights of 6 to 8 hours in between feeds in the past week or so. So we are not complaining but would like to work on a routine as we have some harder moments from time to time. She is bottle fed since birth. She was born 8.5 lbs and is already at 13 lbs. She drinks a lot (you will see!) and never throws up. Only spit up with burps.

Her feeding is almost perfectly routined (every 3 hrs) and her nights looks almost regular but napping is hectic.
We would like to work on two aspects:
* Better grouped longer naps. Again, not the end of the world as she is never angry but I know it will help her long term
* Evening (around bath time) is hell. Maybe we start our routine too late or too early, I don't know.. Help!

This is the logs of the past 3 days. I can go further back if needed:
10/11/2016
…
8:10: Feed (5 oz)
9:10: Sleep
10:10: wake up (slept 1 hr)
10:20: put in swing, fell asleep

11:00: woke up (I think she woke up a bit earlier. Slept probably 30 mins) and Feed (7 oz)
11:30: Sleep

15:15: wake up (slept 3hr45mins. This was a first) and feed (7 oz)
16:30: sleep
16:50: wake up (slept 20 mins)

17:50: Feed (5 oz)
18:50: Bath (super irritated)

19:00: Feed (5 oz)
Wake/sleep/wake. Irritated. Finally fell asleep maybe around 8ish
20:00ish: Sleep for the night

10/12/2016
1AM: wake up and feed (5 oz)
1:15: Sleep. Rocked 15 mins on us and put in bed

4:20: wake up (slept 3 hr) and feed (5 oz)
5:20: Rocked back to Sleep. Took longer as she pooped and was a bit more agitated
6:00: wake up. (slept 45 mins) Decided to rock her to sleep and keep her on me until 7 to “take her until start of day”
7:00: Put back to bed

7:30: wake up (slept 1.5 hr if counting since 6am as she did not stay awake long) and feed (5 oz)
8:30: Rocked to sleep
9:15: woke up (slept 45 mins); burped twice. Rocked to sleep, took about 30 mins
9:45: fell asleep

10:50: wake up (slept 1 hr) and feed (7 oz)
12:15: sleep (in car)
12:45: woke up (slept 30 mins)

13:45: feed (5 oz)
14:00: sleep (in stroller)
14:30: woke up (slept 30 mins)

16:15: sleep (in swing)
16:45: woke up (slept 30 mins)
17:35: sleep (on us)
18:05: woke up (slept 30 mins)
19:00: bath

19:10: feed (7oz)
19:20: sleep
19:50: woke up (slept 30 mins) and burped
20:00: sleep
wake/sleep/wake. not happy/irritated
~21:00: finally sleep for the night

10/13/2016
2:10: wake up (slept 5hr-ish) and feed (7 oz) + diaper (poop)
3:10: sleep

6:45: wake up (slept 3.5 hrs) and feed (6 oz)
8:00: sleep (on her own in bed)

9:00: woke up (slept 1 hr) but still looked tired
9:35: sleep (on us)

10:35: woke up (slept 1 hr) and feed (tbd)

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For the evening, should we start our routine earlier than 7PM? Or opposite, we should give her an extra catnap and start it later?
We tried dream feed in the past 2 days by waking her up between 10:30PM and 11PM but she litterally never sucked on the bottle. We even tried "waking" her up a bit more but nothing to do! We did not try to push further as we did not want her to wake up completely either

Thanks for any help! We are not desperate as overall, we believe we are lucky but we believe working slowly towards a better napping routine will help. If you think we are fine as is and things will get better with time (I understand 7.5 weeks old is young!), let us know!

[Lindsay27]

Hi and welcome to your newest addition!  You are right, things at 7.5 months can be a little all over the place and you probably won't have a really good routine for a few more weeks but it always nice to start thinking about it and setting the stage . Traditionally 30 min naps tend to be OT and from what I can see your A times can vary, so the best advice I think I can give right now is to try to keep A times a little more consistent.  I think at 7.5 weeks you are looking at somewhere between 1-1.15hr.  Obviously every day is not going to have perfectly set A times but it is just something to more or less aim for. 

As for the evening, it seems to be the "witching hour" with so many LOs, mine included!  I would maybe try to bring everything forward a bit to avoid OT.  Even if she does a nap later in the evening, A times are so low at this point it shouldn't affect BT too much.  General rule is to try to keep a 12hr day, so if she wakes at 7am BT would be 7pm.

As I said however, she is still so little so I think you are doing fantastic so far . I think things tend to fall into place a little more once you are fully on a 3hr routine.

[exeon]

Thank you Lindsay.
The thing is, our little one do not really have A time much yet. Because of her cat napping, as you can see, she gets tired quickly it seems. So she snoozes on irregular patterns.

My wife just told me that today, after my post, she slept from 11:30 and is still sleeping now (3PM). This occured multiple times and seems to become a trend. She cat naps during the AM and takes a 3-4 hours nap in the middle of the day and cat naps again in the evening. Should we wake her up to limit her mid day napping? It is not happening all the time but I have a feeling it is happening 3 or 4 days a week so looking like a trend

[Lindsay27]

I think at this stage the most important thing is just to keep the EAS pattern, while the length of naps or quantity is something that will eventually regulate.  I don't think I would necessarily cap naps unless over 3hrs, I think beyond that feeds might be affected as well as night sleep.

[exeon]

Do you mean we should maximize napping at 3 hours max or you mean try to stick to eating everyb3 hours?

Our LO ate at 10:45 and than slept from 11:30 to 3:45! So she ate at 3:45. We will see how this will affect her sleeping tonight. She is about 6oz under her average so I wonder if she will wake up an extr time tonight

[Lindsay27]

I mean I wouldn't let her sleep longer than 3hrs at a time during the day.  Longer than that and they start to confuse their day sleep and night sleep, and exactly as you said it pushes feeds farther apart so you may end up feeding more in the night.

[exeon]

Hi Lindsay and all,
Our little one is starting to fit in a schedule where she naps for an hour in the morning, 2 to 3 hours around noon and another couple of 30 mins in the afternoon. We are OK with this.

One thing we are trying to understand is the pre-night routine.
*EVERY SINGLE* night, our little one does this:
6:30/6:45 = Bath
7:00ish = Feed (bottle)
She is usually tired and will often start closing her eyes
7:30ish = close her eyes
We keep her on us for ~30 minutes with the goal to put her in bed once she goes into "non REM". At the 30 minutes mark, every single time, she will wake up and start fighting. We keep her on us rocking her a bit with her pacifier, 99% of the times she falls asleep within 10 minutes. After another 30 minutes from when she woke up (so about an hour after she slept the first time), we put her in bed with no issues. She will wake up only much later in the night for a feed.

So basically, every single night, we get:
Feed - Falls asleep - 30 mins later wake up - Refalls asleep within 10 mins - Put in bed 30 mins later
So from the time we start the feed until we put her in bed, it can take between an hour fifteen to 2 hours. It's not the end of the world but we are looking for ideas to be able to get our little one settled in her crib quickly-ish after her feed.

Thanks!

[Lindsay27]

30min stints tend to be OT so I wonder if you bring BT forward if this would help, so start bath routine around 6pm and aim for BT to be 7pm.