Difficulty napping - 11 week old

[dentyandliqing]

Hiya guys,

Our 11 week old daughter gets really tired during her day, but she seems to find it difficult to nap during the day for any prolonged period.

During the night she is fine. We usually send her to bed by 8-8.30 pm, and she sleeps until 6.30-7.30 am (barring a couple of feeds) quite well most nights now.

But days are the problem. She begins to get grouchy and is obviously tired as the day goes on. But doesn't seem to be able to sleep. (The exception is ? predictably ? if we take her out with us in the car somewhere: then she sleeps fine. :-))

The fact that she's getting grouchy makes us think she really should sleep. But how can we teach her? We're reluctant to just let her cry herself to sleep. Taking her out for a walk works, but she usually wakes sometime soon after arriving back home.

Any ideas? Are we worrying too much? Do you think she'll work it out herself?

denty & Li Qing.

I tried putting dd3 on her tummy for naps (not at night), and it changed her napping pattern completely! 2-3 hour naps instead of 20-30 minutes, and no difficulty falling asleep.

Hth

My DD found sleeping hard at this age. We brought her for cranial osteopathy and the lady who did this gave us excellent advise. Basically she explained that babies this age (and up to possibly 6 months) really struggle with being awake for longer than 2 hours and then get overtired and then cannot sleep. They also sleep in 45 minute cycles so naps will tend to be 45 mins or hour and half or 2 hours and quarter etc.

We set up a consistent pattern of putting her down to nap, swaddled, about 2 hours after she had woken up usually in her cot. It worked like a dream! She would wake at 7, feed, nap for 45 mins at 9. Feed again, nap at 11.15 or 11.30 for up to 3 hours, up at 2.30pm ish, feed, nap for 45 mins at 4.30 for 45 mins, up at 5.15, feed then start evening routine at 7pm geting her settled for the night at about 7.30/8... She was way more happy and settled once we did this and the fact that we based it on settling her to sleep once awake for 2 hours made it very flexible ie if she happened to wake in the morning earlier or later than 7am we just started the timing from there rather than sticking rigidly to set times for naps etc. What I found also was that often at the 2 hour mark she would seem really awake but as soon as I swaddled her and put her down she would be out like a light! If we left it longer than that she could be impossible to settle.

At 11 weeks she was feeding a couple of times in the night - usually at about 11pm and again about 3 or 4am. She dropped the 11pm feed first so her long sleep was from 7 or 8pm until 2 or 3am and then that gradually pushed out a bit longer.

I definitely would not let her cry it out. When we started I found gently patting her chest and softly singing or shushing helped her drift off and then just being aware that she would be coming in to light sleep and likely to be disturbed after 45 mins so keeping things a bit quieter then or being ready to pop in and settle her again at this point helped to train her into a longer lunchtime nap. Also we put blackout linings on her bedroom curtains to keep it a bit darker. We also introduced a dummy for naps and were really strict about her only getting it when she was in her cot and ready to sleep so she associated it with sleeping. We swaddled until she was almost 4 months old and then moved her into a sleeping bag.

She's a great sleeper now (14 months) - goes down really easily at about 7.15 or 7.30 and sleeps until 6.30 or 7. Occasionally has a 30/45 min morning nap and always has 2/3 hours in the afternoon.

I should say that just rereading through this makes it sound v easy! It takes persistence and at various stages the pattern will just abruptly change and I am under no illusions that the current pattern could change again too. Training her to nap in her cot did mean it was hard to get out sometimes and after holidays etc we had a couple of weeks of establishing a pattern again. For us it was worth it though as when she sleeping well everything else seems much easier - she's such a happy girl when the sleep is right!

Good luck with it all.

sounds like my 9wo too - he's also seemingly wide-awake and then suddenly crying and overtired but won't nap - so it is hard to spot when to put him down. I'll try the 2hr trick - thanks!