4 month old sleep schedule

[ASomers]

I'm looking for some advice or just to know that I'm not alone/ to know whether this is normal!

My 4 month old generally sleeps well at night, with the odd bad night recently (I'm guessing 4 month sleep regression). She won't go down for naps at all... I've previously posted on here about that. She'll sleep in the sling and that's it. However, I have heard from others that this is normal a her age so I've tried to relax a bit about not being able to put her down for naps and not having a solid nap routine.

However, she goes to bed very early and wakes up very early. On an ideal night she'll go to bed at 7 and wake at 5 (waking a couple of times in the night for feeds). This is very much the ideal and more often she'll be desperately tired from 5ish and I will try my best to keep her going until 6 when I end up putting her to bed. Then she'll most likely be awake at 4ish.

Last night, she was asleep at 6:30 and woke up fully wide awake at 3:30. As I write this, she is asleep. I go to bed when she does, otherwise I just won't get enough sleep.

I'm mostly grateful that I'm getting the hours of sleep I need. However, I would like to know if there's anything I can do to get her to go to bed later. It's particularly a problem as my husband works shifts so when he is working days, he'll be home after 7 and by this time, I'm already in bed!

I guess I just feel a bit stuck as I've really tried moving her bedtime later but she'll be desperately tired if I persist which then just makes it very hard to get her to settle for bed eventually.

I should also note that the time or length of her daytime naps doesn't seem to make any difference!! She slept from 12-2:30 today and was still very tired by 5...

Sorry for the long post... This is just making me feel like a bit of a failure.

Any reassurance would be appreciated!

I bet the issue is that she's awake far too much in the day. At 4 months, she can probably only tolerate 90min-2hrs of awake time between naps. So today, you probably should have put her down for a mini-nap at 4, 4.30ish and woken her at 5, then started bedtime at 7ish.

At 4 months DD was sleeping 3 naps a day. Around 9.30 /30min; 1pm 1.5hrs; 4.30pm 10-30 mins. Bed time around 8, 2 night feeds and up at c. 8am

How is she at self settling? Perhaps if you could work on that (swaddling, dummy and white noise) it would be easier to get the daytime naps in so that night time is a bit easier. As she's so young still perhaps she is waking after a certain amount of time hungry?

Wishing you all the best! It's tough at the beginning to get a good routine established but it definitely gets easier I promise!

Sorry meant to say swaddling, dummy and white noise worked for us! (Not that it works for all babies.)

Give her an extra nap. My DS has his last nap between 6&7, then goes to sleep between 9&10.
That works for us because DH isnt home until at least 6 every night so he gets to see him then.
And then he doesnt wake up until anything inbetween 08:30 - 10am every morning. Its bliss he is 6.5 months old. Doesnt feed in the night anymore. We had a sleep regression at 4 months and he was doing exactly the same, going to bed at half 7 then getting up twice throughout the night and then up by 6am. That extra nap worked wonders for us.

Definitely need a nap in before her bedtime. We worked on 2-2.5 hours maximum awake time at that age.

Generally this fell as

7am awake
9.30-10.30 nap
12.30-2.30pm nap
30 min nap around 4.30/5pm
7pm bed

Of course, it rarely ran perfectly to schedule and could be moved earlier or later, depending on when the morning started. But I would try and focus on max awake times and avoid baby getting overtired. Cortisol builds up in tired babies and makes it much harder for them to wind down and sleep. Avoiding overtiredness should make settling baby for naps easier. Also if you start getting baby wake 30/40 mins after bedtime, this is usually a classic sign of overtiredness.

@lovinglivinglife great at self settling at night but not at all for day naps. I've tried a dummy several times and she just won't take one. I tried white noise for daytime naps and it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Thanks for everyone's advice about max wake times. I didn't fully explain her nap times. I would say she usually doesn't go longer than 2.5 hours without a nap anyway and will usually have a mini nap at around 4-5ish to get her through till 7.