help! 12 week old reluctant to nap during day

[scottygirl5]

I'm desparately looking for advice/suggestions/reassurancce about my LO's sleep. Apologies if I ramble!

My DD is 12 weeks old and has always been a poor sleeper. From 4-11 weeks she slept on me in bed at night as she would just scream continuously every time we put her into the crib and it got to the point where we just couldn't get her in it at all and my DH and I didn't want to do CC or CIO. Luckily she is back in it now and tends to wake 2-3 times a night though she needs swaddled/prince lionheart bear/sometimes white noise to get her back down after each feed. Unfortunately we've not cracked 'getting her down' for daytime naps. She has most of her naps on me after feeding though she will also fall asleep if I put her in a sling/baby carrier, basically as long as she is on someone. In the baby carrier she can sleep for quite a while, up to 2 hours, but on me she mainly sleeps for just half an hour, sometimes more (an hour) sometimes less (at worst 5 minutes). This afternoon she slept for just 20 minutes from 1pm until 5.15pm. I'd love her to be able to sleep off us and also sleep for longer but when we try the techniques we use at night she just cries.

All the books seem to say that babies her age need 5-6 hours of naps during the day but we're lucky if she gets 3. I'm pretty sure that she needs to sleep for more than she does right now as she often gets a bit fussy/whingy when she hasn't slept for a while. I'm really worried about what the lack of sleep is doing to her as she also doesn't get the recommended 10 hours at night (tends to get about 8ish in total).

Any advice about how to get her to sleep more during the day would be welcome as I'm worried about her and worried that its our fault for being so taken with having a cuddly baby sleeping on us at the start that we maybe didn't put her down enough.

Have you read the Baby Whisperer? I used her techniques to get DD down in her cot for naps, basically rubbing her tummy and shhhhing her to sleep, so you are there with her but she's learning to self settle and not be fed/cuddled/rocked to sleep. Takes a lot of perseverance tho!

I think it's common for babies this age to have lots of short catnaps rather than longer naps so you have to go with it. My DD slept exactly 30 mins every nap til she was about 10 months.

Also, just get out for a walk with the pram, walk til she's asleep then park up at a cafe with a good book...

Thanks for the reassurance Teuchter, good to know she's not the only catnapper! Unfortunately she cries in the pram :(, has only ever slept in it once when she was a week old. Have tried the baby whisperer but DD tends to just keep escalating her cries into a scream...Might be that we've not shhhhed for long enough though, tend to give up once she is crying tears as we can't bear to see it. How long did you have to persevere for?

Hi scotty, we had a similar problem with 4.5 month old DD. We didn't get into very good napping habits to begin with and by the time she got out of cuddly newborn phase we had no idea how to put her down and she never seemed to want to go down! We also carried her for the first four months and as we were always out and about she would sleep in the carrier a lot.

My tips are:

• at the very first sign of tiredness, put DD down into her cot. As in, the first eye rub or hair pull or whatever it is she does. Don't leave it any longer.
• do whatever you do to soothe her when you put her to sleep at night. We would do the chest press, the 'shhh', white noise, whatever. If she is used to being on you, perhaps lean over her as closely as you can. When she is calm, leave the room.
• when she starts fussing, go back in and repeat the process. And again and again. It can seem to take forever, but she will sleep eventually. The first couple of times I did it I timed it and it took about 30 minutes - which doesn't seem too bad but felt absolutely interminable!

We found a dummy helped, we only give it to her when she needs to sleep and now as soon as we give it to her she goes into sleep position.

Good luck.