4mo old short naps are driving me bonkers

[Scottishbump85]

My LO is 4.5 months old and for the past month has only been napping for 30/40 mins max. She wakes still tired most of the time and therefore grouchy. It doesn’t matter where she naps (cot, bouncy chair, car or buggy), I could almost set my watch by her wake up time! Oh and she’s not a particularly cuddly baby so holding her doesn’t work either!

Please tell me longer naps are on the horizon? I find my day consists of just trying to get many short naps out of her so she’s not a total grump :(

Sorry but I didn’t get any longer till my baby was 15 months old.

I know it feels hard now but ride it out, I think it’s best not to sweat naps too much (from grim experience stressing about naps to no avail)

With each nap they drop, the remaining ones get longer. You can’t really so anything to change it so relax as much as you can.

Thanks both. It’s hard to relax as she really does get grumpy without the naps so I do get anxious about making sure she gets enough sleep throughout the day.

I think it's normal at that age to have short naps at that age mine was having maybe 4 20/30 min naps. Getting longer now he's older at 7 months - naps 3 times a day and 40 min/1 hour naps. Think they get even longer when older and drop to one or two naps a day

I can only get my 4.5 month old to nap longer in sling in a dark room with white noise whilst swaying. I just put the iPad on Netflix and have headphones in.

I did 'wake to sleep' with my DS to lengthen his naps and it worked really well.

Have a Google but essentially, if he always woke at 30 mins, I'd go in at 25 mins and gently stir him. Not enough to fully wake but enough to rouse slightly and then drift back off and it seemed to trigger him into another sleep cycle. I did it for all naps for 3/4 days and then he naturally started doing 2 sleep cycles and having a longer sleep.

@TeethingBabyHelp that’s interesting and also a huge gamble 😱😂

My 4 month old is the same, that's IF I can get him to nap at all. I'm trying not to stress too much about the whole nap thing, wake windows etc, as nothing has worked so far so taking the lead from him

Second 'wake to sleep' it worked magic at lengthening DS's naps but with the caveat that he was slightly older! Good luck!

Can't help much but just here to say my 4.5 month old also does the same. Although some days she has one nap that goes up to 2h sometimes even 2.5! Those days are the best as she's really rested and fun!

Really hoping she will get better over time. She does sleep well at night, though... one stretch of 5-6h and another of 3-4h.

@kisaki333 oooh a 2 hour nap! Lush! She actually had a 1.5 hour nap the other morning and that was a really good day cos she was mostly happy!

She also sleeps well over night (just coming out of a wee regression I think/hope) so I shouldn’t really complain, but it does make the days long! Haha!

We tried the 'double nap' around this age - as soon as there was the slightest stir from him, one of us would get straight in there shushing, singing or whatever, recreating the nap routine to try and send him back off. It worked maybe 30% of the time but that was enough to keep us sane and him just about rested!

I think this is more normal than people think, I thought my baby was the odd one out for short naps and they drove me up the wall as I thought he ‘should’ be sleeping longer, in fact from speaking to my friends their kids were the same. My baby didn’t start sleeping longer until about 12 months when he dropped to one nap but even now at 2 his nap is anything from 50 minutes - 2 hours! Luckily I gave up caring a long time ago!