Anyone trying the baby whisperer EASY routine? I need a bit of help with it!

[BeaandMe]

I am trying to do the baby whisperer EASY routine with my nearly 4 week old dd. I didn't use a routine with ds and he was a complete night time disaster until he was 2 years old so we are determined not to make the same mistakes this time around.

So it all goes well in the morning using a three hour EASY routine but then its a mess...she goes down for a nap at around 1-2pm but then is completely unwakable until 5pm! So much for an hour and a half max nap! I can't wake her at all, I change her nappy, strip her off a bit, wipe her face with a flannel, but nothing works. Then she is awake alot of the evening and last night didn't sleep until 1.30 by which stage she is over tired. I think if I could just wake her in the afternoons everything else would follow.

Any tips or thoughts would be appreciated . Thanks

Have you been to the Baby Whisperer forum at all? There are some fantastic people over there who are experts in the techniques. Personally, I have had a lot of success with it, but I only started at about 3-4mo so I'm not sure how to deal with a 4-week-old. Plus sleeping too much in the day was not an issue for us - DD went very much the other way!

Good luck with it. :)

I did easy, but took to heart that it was a pattern more than anything else in the early days. If she really wants that long a nap, then I would let her! Have you tried a dream feed type feed to wake her?

We used EASY very successfully but a while ago now (DS is 3 now).

What is happening is that your baby's body is identifying the after-lunch slot as the "nighttime" long-sleep time, and you need to reset her clock so that this happens later instead.

Watch your baby carefully during an after lunch-nap to analyse what is happening. She won't be sleeping deeply throughout, she will be having sleep cycles of between 45 and 90 minutes during which there will be periods of lighter and deeper sleep. She will be completely unwakable during the deeper parts of the cycle but wakable if you catch a lighter point. It may be that her "lighter" points are very short and easy to miss.

Say that you detect that she is normally having a period of lighter sleep about 40 minutes in. Wake her at this point - yes she won't have had enough sleep yet but that's OK, you can have a shortish EASY cycle and get her back for another 40 minutes kip quite soon after.

We had this sort of thing and found that DS would happily sleep the whole afternoon until bedtime if we'd let him. This phase will pass though!

Thanks for the replies, sorry I took so long to get back to the thread! For some reason it just resolved itself the next day. She just had a 1.5 hr nap and woke up herself, I have no idea why! She then slept for a whole 6 hours in a row at night, so I'm delighted!

Thanks for the tip about the baby whisperer forum...I'm sure I'll be spending loads of time on there .

Thanks again

Hi. Been reading your thread and my 13 week old follows easy throughout the day then come tea time has a massive sleep which I'm finding hard to break him from. He will have 2.5-3 hours and if I wake him he's really grumpy and just screams back to bed. He's not brill at night I might add.