Bless Natalie's little 4-month-old heart: she's a big baby, eats like a horse, but has spaced herself out to 4-hour feeds. She's usually easy to read, at least before about 4PM, and spends most of her time either looking around or crawling around.
BUT - and this is a huge BUT - EVERY DAY is different schedule-wise!!!! She wakes at different times (about half the time 5-5:30-ish but sometimes not till 7 or 7:30, but sometimes in the neighborhood of 6). Her first nap she can be ready for in one hour, two hours, or anywhere in between. It can last 45 minutes or 2.5 hours., with no relation to the amount of time spent awake beforehand most of the time. I may or may not be able to get her back to sleep if she DOES waken early.
After that, she's usually awake 90 minutes to 2 hours for most of the day, and I'd say that 2/3 -3/4 of her naps are 90 minutes, assuming she isn't hungry (she will NOT nurse before a nap time if it hasn't been 4 hours since the last feed, but WILL wake up after 30 minutes demanding my boobs' presence NOW already! :roll:)
Well, most of the time we tweak it to make it mostly work, and it mostly does most of the time. AND most of the time, the late afternoon is a total nightmare. She will only take more than 3 naps if the first two were 45 minutes long (and won't go down before she's been up 90 minutes regardless, stubborn little Taurus baby!
. Today she had two good naps, and then the third nap was 30 minutes. What's the problem with having a catnap for the last nap? Well, she went down at
2PM and woke at
2:30 even though she'd nursed just BEFORE the nap. And she will NOT, no way, come hell or high water, no how, nap after about 3:30. (Exception: sometimes goes to bed w/o a feed because it hasn't been long enough and wakes hungry after 45 minutes and may not go back to sleep for 2 more hours :x)
For the past two months or so, bedtime has been an absolute NIGHTMARE. She's usually up from her final nap around 3-4PM, and I try to time her bath by 5:30 and bed by 6. She has been known to chug down 6+ ounces of EBM and demand more at bedtime, so there's always a big bottle, but half the time she'll turn it down and SCREAM bloody murder. Sometimes I'll try to nurse her in case she doesn't want the bottle, and she'll scream but then accept the bottle. And finally we had to re-introduce the pacifier so she had something to suck on that didn't make her scream - but half the time we try that, she spits THAT out too. But if we don't give her anything and try to sit with her to calm her she screams bloody murder - you see a theme here?
When she doesn't take the late nap, sometimes she wants a feed when she wakes at 3:30, but then she's not hungry at bedtime - but then wakes looking for food half an hour to an hour later. When she doesn't take the feed, she's starving around 5:30, so I rush her through her bath so she can have the bottle around 5:45, but by then she's screaming too hard to want it. Once I put her down, if she hasn't had the bottle, she'll fidget for a while till she wakes and then will nurse and take a full feed.
I really don't have a clue what I'm doing wrong, how to get her to take a nap after 4PM, how to finagle the feeds and the bedtime, why she'll happily suck down 6 ounces of milk one night and scream bloody murder when I offer her the same bottle with new milk the next night with no other changes in the afternoon sleeps and feeds.
In short, WTF?!?!?! :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:
