Thanks! Ok, I'm doing 2.15 A time and will report back.
To answer your question, after sleeping and after several hours she sometimes will eat, sometimes not. The other day for example, she had proper feeds at 6am and 12pm but just a 1min snack at 9am. I'm not worried, she is fine but some days she won't have a proper feed for 8h, just two 1min snack for the first half of the day. I think it's a distraction issue as she then becomes really hungry at nap time and ears very well before half falling asleep on the boob, which she's never done before. I've tried feeding before opening the curtains in the morning but it doesn't change anything. If there has been a feed less than 6h earlier she's just not hungry, which throws the all easy out of the window straight away as she won't eat until she's in her cot for a nap. Hope it's just a phase...
I thought babies would be on any rythm as long as it was 12h. She seems to struggle with 8.30-8.30 as she was up again at 7am the other day in spite of falling asleep at 9pm yesterday
(OT behaviour I think). I'm ok with her finding another rythm if it suits her but there's no consistency so hard to know what she needs. We do bath at 6.30 or 1h30 ish after the end of her last nap, whichever is the earlier, and from that on it depends on how long she eats for and how long she takes to go down. She can eat for 15 or 45min and then takes anything between 15 to 60min to fall asleep. We've tried bath earlier (5.30pm or 6pm) but then she often refuses to eat and I have to wait up to half an hour until she finally accepts the breast (she cluster-feeds every hour for the last three hours before bed and in that case I move the earlier feeds as well but that doesn't always work).
I'm very confused because we've had two very different days that don't make sense to me.
Yesterday, she woke up at 7.15, had a 50min nap at 9.30. It then took 1h to get her to sleep for her midday nap because I insisted on her falling asleep with me out of the bedroom, so she fell asleep at 1.20 after 3h A time and I thought we would get a crap OT nap but we got 1h25! (I know it's not 1h30 but pretty close and awesome for us!) She then refused to nap at 5pm, so that was 4h of A time...I was bracing myself for a hard evening but she fell asleep at 7.15 beautifully, without a sound!! And she slept very soundly without being restless
Today, she woke up at 7.30. We managed to get her to nap 45min, not more, with perfect A times of 2h15/2h20min, and last nap finishing at 5pm. Bath same time as yesterday at 6.30pm and down to sleep at 7.15. She seemed sleepy initially but was very excited within 5min and wanted to talk, grab everything, practice rolling, giggle, and cried when we tried to leave her to sleep (strangely seemed UT!). She finally fell asleep at 10pm only because I gave her my finger to suck on, something I hadn't done since she was a few weeks old!! What did we do wrong?? Why is it working less well when we follow the textbook?? Or did she get too OT yesterday and it's backfiring? She can't possibly need a 2-3-4 schedule, can she?? (I think these only work for much older babies and I really wasn't trying to implement it). No idea but I'm pretty burnt out tonight.
We'll get her up at 7.30 tomorrow (but she'll certainly wake up early from OT anyway) in order to try to set a schedule in place. We'll now aim for a 7.30-7.30 day which might work better for her.
(btw, wanted to say thanks and you were right about increasing the first A time. She clearly can handle it.)