Help! BW or NCSS? 6mo refusing naps.

[bagelmonkey]

DD is now 6 1/2 months. She's never been a great sleeper, but naps are particularly bad.
She's BF and we've just started BLW, but not really eating anything yet.
At around 4 months I used the baby whisperer shh-pat and PU/PD techniques and she got much better. She was taking decent naps and as a consequence her night sleeping was much better.
There's been a lot of upset to her routine and I naps have been getting progressively worse. I cant get her to wind-down at all. She just wants to play. She was settling a bit if I let her get a bit cranky, but now that doesn't work either. PU/PD no longer works. If she thinks I'm trying to take her for a nap she either gets very wriggly or starts moaning in protest then escalates to crying in my arms. She won't relax at all. I can't PD because she won't stop crying.
She now gets so tired that she is falling asleep on the boob. All the effort I put in to stopping that and I'm back to the beginning again!

Do I just hold her until she stops crying ie exhausts herself? That would seem to be the continuation of the PU/PD that worked before.

Will the no cry nap solution help? I'll buy the book if it works. How long will it take?

Could she be over-tired - have you tried putting her down before she gets cranky? Thats the only thing that works for my 4 and a half month old- she has no sleepy signals until it's too late!!

Sorry though I have no clue about NCSS.

That used to work.
But now she goes from refusing to be wound down and being very playful to cranky and overtired very quickly.

Can you not just feed her to sleep for naps if that works?

Feeding to sleep will work if she's tired enough when it's time for a feed, but it's not really a viable long-term solution. At some point she will need to go to a crèche if I'm going to go back to work. It also means it could end up being the only way she'll get to sleep, which wouldn't be good for so many reasons.

:( :( poor you!

I went through a similar phase with my DS but when he was 4 months old. A friend recommended a fantastic book that I'll try and boil down in a few bullet points here:

1. Human beings work on a 90 minute BRAC (Basic Rest and Activity Cycle), which means that every 1.5 hrs we exhibit certain behaviours e.g. play / alertness, oral activity (eating, smoking, thumb sucking, touching our mouths etc) and rest / sleep window.
2. This means naps tend to be 45 min long (or multiples of) and 1.5 hours after your baby wakes up is the optimum time for the next nap So if your baby wakes at 7am put them down again at 8.30am (or start routine earlier so they can sleep at 8.30am exactly).

Oh, that only took 2 bullets! When I tried this, I fed / rocked / etc to sleep at exactlt 1.5 hours after the last waking for a few days. This regulated my DS's circadian rhythm and stopped him from being over tired. Then, when he was an amenable baby, I tried BW again (and realised that he was pratically on the 4 hour EASY naturally) so that I didn't have to feed him to sleep.

HTH