7 month old short naps

[Cinnamon84]

7 mo ds has always been a crap napper. He sleeps in solid chunks at night (7-9.30, 9.30-3/4, 3/4-5/6)

During the day I will feed him, he'll briefly wake as I put him in his cot, shh/pat him to sleep. He'll then roll onto this front and wake up after about 15/20 minutes and I'll need to rock him and repeat the shh/pat. This normally happens 2 or 3 times. I know he's tired as on the second or third time of doing this he'll stay down for over an hour...

I don't want to keep doing this as it's so exhausting. I can't get on with anything as I'm anxiously watching him on the monitor. I've tried leaving him and he just rolls around. I'm watching him now and he's shuffling towards the camera! 😩

Does anyone have any advice? Is it just going to get worse the more mobile he gets?!

[FATEdestiny]

This may not be what you want to hear, but I think the very best thing you can do is change your expectations and negative narrative.

Change your negative narrative:
"ds has always been a crap napper"

To positive self-talk:
"DS has made great progress towards independent sleeping in 7 months. I have done a great job in teaching him using gentle, kind methods without creating any distress"

I don't want to keep doing this as it's so exhausting

This could also be negative self-talk. It doesn't need to be exhausting having to resettle back to sleep. You could just take the 5 minutes it takes to resettle, not attach any anxiety or sub-text to the need to resettle, just see it as 5 minutes then carry on with what you were doing.

Do you have another child or responsibility needing your time? If not, then if you find waiting to resettle exhausting, lie on your bed while waiting to resettle. That's calm and relaxing then.

This has a lot to do with expectations too. Leaving him (as you mentioned trying) isn't going to work. He will need you to help him settle for a long time yet. But as you make more progress, he will need fewer resettles. Don't get anxious that you need to do 2 or 3 resettles, be thankful you don't need to do 4 or 5. Know that in time youll only need to do 1 or 2. Then sometimes you wont need to do any.

I assume you are establishing tools for independent self-soothing - comforter, dummy etc?

Its usually after 12 months before baby really bonds with a comforter, so start feeling comforted to snuggle into their special thing. So you have a while yet before baby can learn this. Dummies are quicker to establish, but you still need to do dummy reinserts until baby has the skills to do this himself.

Really - just relax, accept the sleep situation as it is and keep making those changes and progress towards independent sleep.

[Cinnamon84]

Hi FATE, ok thanks for the advice. I actually meant my post in a fairly lighthearted way as it is sometimes quite funny seeing what he gets up to on the monitor.

Part of the reason I don't want to keep going up to resettle was because I thought at this stage I was supposed to be leaving him to try and settle himself. If it means he'll sleep more I don't mind really but I'm just thinking about when he starts childcare/staying with grandparents in a few months as they won't be able to keep going back in to rock him.

At night he doesn't have any problems resettling unless he's hungry or in pain with teeething, just completely different in the day