Hi there
I’ve never posted on a forum before but I am at my wits end. Please tell me if this is the wrong place to do it.
My 5 month old won’t nap during the day. I am amazingly lucky that she has slept through the night since 11weeks. No feeds at all and self settles. This was her own doing and no training or anything involved. At this last feed she generally feeds to sleep or will rock over and that’s her til 7am.
The problem is during the day and that is not to sound ungrateful but she is absolutely shattered and not a happy bunny. She won’t naturally fall asleep and becomes overtired and grumpy. I left her one day to see if she would fall asleep herself but she went for hours and hours and wasn’t at all happy and I had to rock her over to sleep. I tried sleep training when she hit 4 months with the controlled crying method. I really stuck to the timings despite it being agony for the both of us. I tried it for 3 weeks and whilst she went to sleep after crying, she never got better at falling asleep herself and still cried ALOT! it just upset us both and she didn’t learn to self settle during naps.
I’ve been trying to establish a nap routine by placing her in her sleeping bag, reading a book and a dummy. She won’t keep a dummy in herself. She eventually falls asleep after a bit of upset and then I place her in cot. She only sleeps for 35 minutes and wakes groggy/grumpy. If I let her sleep in my knee she would sleep longer but my HV told me I had to stop this and stop rocking her to sleep as this would be harder to stop as she gets older!
I just don’t know what to try next? Or am I expecting too much from her at 5m?Is it actually ok to let her sleep on me during the day as her nights are ok? I really don’t want to upset her to the point it upsets her night sleeping. But then I read all these things about how bad it is to not teach them to self settle? I just want to do what’s best!