Naptime Nightmare!

[Anon19911991]

So I wish someone had told me that when babies are tired, they don’t just… go to sleep. First time mum to a 13 wk old and suddenly Naptime is a complete disaster!

Im not expecting her to be on any kind of schedule, and I know appropriate wake windows for her age are 60-90mins, but it seems that no matter how early or late we try for aleep there’s screaming and thrashing and general misery had by all.

I feel like I’m just completely failing at
picking up on her sleep cues, but I swear there are none! She goes from happy to screaming in like 5 seconds, and it’s such inconsolable crying it’s insane!
We’ve tried swaddling, dark rooms, white noise. Tried napping on the go or in carriers. We’ve addressed her CMPA and tried the odd calpol. Whatever few naps she does have are always contact naps and usually falling asleep bf. But it’s like the second she feels tired she’s screaming, but it’s impossible to get her to sleep before she reaches that point!

Am I missing something? Is this a phase and it’ll all be fine soon? Because it’s been 3 weeks of screaming before every nap and every bedtime and I’m f-ing exhausted!

I fed mine to sleep until he was approx 6 months, granted not meant to but it worked so 🤷‍♀️ and every feed was just before rough sleep window time.

Dummies work for some, contact naps for others, vibrations for others.. a bit of trial and error

Is there anything that does create a nice calm sleep?

Aww she's so little still....we didn't have pre nap tears as I would just feed to sleep, does that work? Don't listen to all the scare tactics about a rod for your back etc, it's biologically normal! Or my baby didn't mind pram naps at that age. I never would have been able to just put her down in a cot. But that's fine, I was happy to help her nap.

That used to be exactly how she slept, always fed to sleep. I’d happily still do that but now she gets so worked up so quickly she won’t feed! Even if a feed starts happily enough it’s like she suddenly realised she’s tired and then all hell breaks loose! I’m not even trying to lie her down anywhere for a nap, although I should add that in the night she’ll very happily sleep in her next to me crib! Couple of night feeds and straight back to sleep no stress.

I know it’ll pass, but sure feels good to vent in the meantime haha!

I have one baby who is a dream to feed to sleep when tired, and my older boy who was wild. What worked for him was putting on music, dancing with him (not anything sleepy, we did Simon and Garfunkel) and when he let me dance with him in a nursing position I would then feed standing up and once that was ok sit down and feed. Lasted about a month then he chilled a bit more.

Oh that sounds really tough OP! Could it be better if you have her nap a bit more regularly? Is she maybe getting overtired? So tricky!

Ooh yes walking around the house gently singing and rubbing her back helped for mine too. High effort though!

Hi,

I wrote a similar post about 4 months ago (when DD was 4 months)! What I found helped was having a nap time routine that I used every time she needed a nap (and I did start putting her in her own room in the dark after a while but she was 5 months by then). It was something like read a book, take her upstairs and change her nappy, sing the same 3 songs and then put her down after she'd been asleep for 10 minutes.

I have to say I'm not sure this actually helped or she just got older! At 6 months something changed and at the minute she's sleeping twice a day for 1-2 hours at a time. She was (and still is) a very good night sleeper and I think sometimes they make up for that by refusing to sleep during the day instead.

I also found the huckleberry app was very good for predicting optimum nap times.