Sleep and Napping help!

[Exhaustedmaw]

Hi everyone looking for a bit of advice.

My 5 month old is a serial cat napper, at most he will do 4x 30 mins naps a day and everything I read online says this is too little.

I feel like I’ve tried everything, I watch for his sleep qs, I have altered how long he stays awake for between naps, take him out in the car, pram, rock him, hold him, put him in his crib it doesn’t seem to matter.

His bedtime is at 7 and he still wakes every 4 hours for a feed, his wake up time is 5am and I’m exhausted.

Does anyone have any tips? Will he grow out of this? What kind of nap/ bedtime do you have for your baby? Please help! X

There is a board for sleep, you’ll get lots of advice on there.

BUT I will say please don’t get too worried about what you read online. Baby sleep sites make their money by convincing people that all babies are capable of having a certain sleep pattern if only you did everything perfectly right, which they can tell you to do.

Your 5 month old sleep pattern sounds fairly normal. My DD didn’t link sleep cycles during naps AT ALL until she was 14 months. I had tried EVERYTHING that the internet could suggest! She just started doing it spontaneously when she was developmentally ready.

That bedtime sounds pretty typical, as does how often he is waking, unfortunately. He’s getting about 12 hours in total in a day, which is a little on the low side but not unusual.

How does he settle for his naps?

Oh my boy did this. It's really really common. He just randomly started doing a 2 hour lunchtime nap when he was around 5 months old actually! It was awesome. Prior to that I could occasionally resettle him... but rarely. Most of my friends' babies started doing longer naps at some point between 4 and 6 months. Although one didn't do longer naps til he was at least 10 months.

The 30 mins your LO is doing is the length of his sleep cycle but one day he will learn to go through his sleep cycles. When he's ready.

The night wakes are normal too I'm afraid. Babies' sleep just isn't the same as adult sleep.

5 months is a pretty rubbish period for sleeping as they are going through the change in their sleep cycles at that age. We were on "crap naps" for quite a while and one day he just started taking the odd longer nap on his own and gradually it became the norm rather than the exception. It did take a few months though. Hang in there!

My boy is 6 months old and we found at 4.5months he started waking in the night a lot more for food, even though we knew he was getting plenty in the day. He was ebf at that time and had been only waking up once a night. My husband and I ‘solved’ the problem by swapping sides of the bed so when my baby woke up my husband settled him first (no smell of milk). He went back to waking once a night in about 2 weeks. Now this could just be coincidence but it seemed to work. As for day time naps it seems pretty normal :(

Don't be hard on yourself or DC, sounds very very much like my DD at that age, she didn't figure out how to do longer naps for ages, maybe 7 months? We just did little naps until she figured it out.
The night time routine sounds similar too, I think I was up to bf 2 or 3 times a night when she was 5 months. In fact I think that period of time is when I coslept with her as she went through a phases of waking lots in the night and I couldn't be arsed getting up so often so DP slept in the spare room for maybe 6 weeks while we had the big bed, then at the 6 month mark we moved her into her own room. But for several months she still woke in the night quite a bit. Didn't do a full nights sleep until maybe 8 months.
Hang in there and get as much time for yourself as you can, babysitting family members, get DP to be on duty for a few hours in the day or evening so you can put some earplugs in and sleep without worrying xx

Thanks for all your replies, ill check out the sleep board and hopefully get some ideas! Fingers crossed xx