DS2 turned 2 months yesterday, and for the past couple of weeks his naps have slowly decreased in duration. Yesterday his longest nap was 1 hour. Today, nothing more than 30 minutes.
This afternoon, I drove home and just as I pulled up outside the house his little eyelids were drooping. This was 3pm. So I thought I should drive round a little, get him to sleep for longer. 3.30pm exactly and those eyes popped open. He then wouldn't go to sleep again until 5.50pm, and that was after A LOT of coercion on my part. He slept until 6.15pm. He took ages to go off to sleep this evening at bedtime, and will probably wake soon and need settling. Last night he was waking every couple of hours in the night needing to be settled, whereas previously he's been doing pretty well - dream feed 10/11ish, then a feed somewhere between 2-4am, and up for the day around 7am. I REALLY don't want this to change for the worse...
All the books I've read go on about the importance of daytime sleep and how it influences night time sleep, how lack of decent naps can cause chronic fatigue in a child, how anything less than an hour and they're just cat-napping - not going into deep sleep.
My problem is that our sleep options have become so narrow for him... DS1 is 3yo and with me at home for half the week, so I can't be staying with DS2 for lengthy naptime routines. And we used to swaddle DS2 but now he really seems to resist it. We've introduced a dummy which he quite likes, but not enough to send him off to sleep. I put him in his pram with a muslin over the top and rock him - sometimes he'll go off after 10 minutes or so, other times he cries a lot and won't go off for ages, and never sleeps very long if he has.
This morning he slept in his pram for 30 minutes. I heard him stir so me and DS1 got coats/boots on and headed out the door with the pram. We walked for over half an hour, hoping he'd go back to sleep. He didn't! And we were soaking wet :(
Can anyone help me with this? Really, it's driving me to distraction. I can't stand it when DS cries, and by the end of the day he's so knackered if he hasn't slept well. It breaks my heart. I can't bear it. HELP!