My LO is 12.5 weeks, and through trial and error (and the input from the wise ladies on these boards!) I think we've realized it's time to start transitioning from 3 hour EASY to at least 3.5 hour EASY. He's just not hungry at 3 hours during the 1st half of the day, and then the 2nd half of the day he's ravenous, so hungry that now he's waking early from his naps. I also realized that I wasn't keeping his awake long enough, so clearly it's time to change from 3 hour EASY!
Our schedule is in the midst of changing, so it's sort of hard to tell you what's going on. For one thing, last week we started a 10:30 dream feed (which never worked for us in the past), which has finally gotten Owen to sleep through the night! Hooray! He's consistently sleeping until 6:30-6:45 now. I'm not sure if I should just let him lay there until 7 am, or if I should just have us start our day at 6:30 to be consistent. I'm fine with a 6:30 start, as I think ending our day at 6:30 pm would make him a lot happier (he seems to be too tired by 7 pm even - I notice a big change in his behavior at that time).
Also, he was a GREAT napper(1.5-2 hours consistently each nap) until this last week when he started waking up at the 45 minute mark and not going back to sleep. That's how I learned thru these boards that I wasn't keeping him awake long enough. We are gradually getting the long naps back! However, the morning nap is still short - usually only an hour. So this morning I experimented with keeping him up even longer. Instead of 1.5 hours awake time, he had 1.75 hours awake time.
After his 4 pm bottle, he'll have a catnap sometime between 5-6 pm. Then we'll get up have a bath, bottle, then get ready for bed. He's usually in bed by 7:30-8:00, but he's usually really tired and cranky by this time. We were skipping the 7 pm bottle for awhile (before we were doing the dream feed and trying to get him to sleep thru the night), and he went down for the night at 5:30-6 pm really easily and happily with a 12-1 am wakeup. It just seemed like he was a much happier baby then. I've been trying to figure out how to tweak the schedule so that we can get a 6:30 bedtime because I think that would be ideal. I'm hoping with a 3.5 hour EASY that might happen.
I hope I haven't written too much or confused you! We're just trying to transition here because he's clearly ready to move on from 3 hour EASY, but I'm a little confused as to how to do it. He seemed to do well staying up the extra 15 minutes this morning. He's down for his nap now, and he went down easily and without a fight. We'll see how he does at the 45 minute and 1 hour mark!
