7 month old routine?!

[Toowittoowoo]

DD2 has had no routine until about a month ago when we started to wean and she has fallen into a pattern of napping at 9am (after breakfast) and 1pm (after lunch). However, I am struggling to get her to sleep for more than 30 mins at 1pm which means that she is shattered by bedtime. she won't willingly nap later in the afternoon but if we happen to be in the car around 4pm she will normally fall asleep. From experience, if I let her sleep for more than 10mins or so then I will have no hope of getting her to sleep at bedtime (7pm).

This all very strange for me as DD1 got herself into a routine by about 4 months and needed lots of sleep - I remember getting at least 2 hrs in the afternoon!

What do your 7 month olds do?

My ds is 7 months and has never been a good daytime napper.

He goes to bed between 6.30pm and 7 pm and sleeps brilliantly at night but daytimes are hard.

Thing is he needs to nap!!

He usually naps at around 9 am like your dd for about 45 minutes.

After lunch he will nap for about an hour if we go out and walk in the pram.

will your dd nap longer in the pram?

Sorry not much advice but I do have sympathy. I work hard to get ds to have his naps as otherwise he gets really overtired and finds it hard to go to bed

It was around this age that we started helping DD 'learn' to nap past the 35-min sleep cycle - the general idea is that you do whatever it is you did to help them get to sleep in the first place. If we were at home and she woke up after 30 mins, I'd go into her room and pick her up and rock her back to sleep and then put her back in cot. I didn't talk to her, just rocked her quietly. It could take anything from 1-20 mins. If she was in pram, then just continuing to push her (with the snooze shade on - we always used snooze shade for pram naps) would often help her drop back off.

Eventually she picked up the habit of being able to nap through a sleep cycle. We had to do a lot of work to gently help DD learn good sleep habits, in particular with her daytime sleep as she really struggled with that when she was tiny, but it was totally worth it as now (14mo) she's a great sleeper and has been since she was about 8.5 mo.

How long is her 9am nap? If it's particularly long/ short you may need to adjust that to get a better lunchtime nap...

CityDweller, how long did it take before you saw progress with the naps?

We're trying to do the same thing, but it's been a month and a half and I just spent twenty minutes getting DS back to sleep after waking in the middle of his afternoon nap - as usual...

My 8 month old has had the same "routine" for a couple of months now, there is a little bit of variation from day to day though.

She tends to wake any time between 6 and 7am, we can usually manage to keep her in her cot til 7, when she has milk. Breakfast about an hour later. Then she'll go down for a nap around 9:30. This nap will either last 45 minutes, or 1.5 hours - she tends to wake after 45 minutes and that will be it. If I hover and pat/shhh when she starts to stir, she often can go for another 45 minutes.
She has lunch around 12/12:30, then if she only had 45 mins nap in the morning, she'll have another sleep some time between 1pm and 2pm for 45 minutes. If she had a longer morning nap, she'll have a 45 minute afternoon sleep at around 2:30 or 3pm.
Milk happens somewhere around 3ish. I also try not to let her sleep beyond 4pm, otherwise bedtime will go to pot! Dinner around 5pm, bath around 6:15pm and milk then bed by 7pm at the latest.

When I put it in writing, it seems really strict and structured, but it's not really, things vary each day depending on what we're doing/where we are, the main thing for me is trying to get her to have a long morning sleep, and not letting her sleep past 4! I wish the morning sleep would be reliably long every day though, really annoying having to hover nearby to re-settle her.

Like all things with DD's sleep, it was a case of 2-steps-forward-1-step-back, so progress was gradual and halting. But, I think that by the time she was 9 months, or so, I think I rarely needed to go in and resettle her during a nap... (And now, at 14 mo, we have the opposite problem - she'd nap for hours and hours if I let her!)

I have to say, 20 mins to re-settle mid-nap was totally normal for us. But then she'd usually sleep longer, and deeper, when she went back down.