18 week old DS won't nap inside

[teachertrainer80]

At the end of my teather. 18 week old will only nap if I take him out in pushchair. We live on 2nd floor flat with no lift so it's such an ordeal to do it 4 x per day. I have an awful cold at the moment so am desperate for DS to learn to nap in his cot. I have just spent an hour trying to settle him, walking him in the sling etc and after an hour of this (and 15 mins crying in cot while I got ready, assuming I needed to take him out in buggy) he dropped off in cot but I can't really do this all the time either. I'm exhausted! DS going through some sort of growth spurt so feeding 8 x through the night too so I really can't face 4 hours of walking each day to get him to nap!

Any tips?

Have you borrowed my DS?! We had exactly the same problem until he was almost exactly the same age. He would only sleep in the car or the pushchair. (Now I've got him napping in his cot he now fights sleeping in the car, which is v annoying, but hey ho you can't have everything!)

what we did was this:
Worked out a routine of when he slept, so for us it was about 9am, about midday and about 3pm (though this quickly changed to two naps at around 9.30am and 1pm)
I would feed him and then take him for a walk at each of those times every day so he knew the sequence of events.
At the same time I really tightened our bedtime routine and stopped feeding him to sleep, and he got better at self settling (I'm not going to lie, there was some crying)
Then I did a shortened version of the bedtime routine for nap times in his cot when I knew he would be sleepy. He has nappy change, into gro bag, into cot, lights off, shut door.

Now he generally naps nicely in his cot, but will not bloody sleep in the car... Grrrr.

Hope that helpsx

It's the bit that happens after you shut the door that gets me! The screaming! I can't bear it. But I too am in your position teachertrainer80. My dd is 5 mths and will only sleep in her pram, which was fine in the nice weather but is pretty diabolical now in winter. I was walking her round on Thursday in the fog in tears just thinking how bloody stupid I am. I let dh put her in the cot for a nap, we had to endure 45mins of screaming for a 30min nap. I was crying as much as she was. I said never again.

Assuming you have probably tried this but can you not trick him into thinking you're going out but just put him in the buggy but stay inside? My 15 week old twins have all their naps in the buggy but I only take them out once a day. For the other naps, I just jig the buggy for a couple of mins in the kitchen and they tend to just drop off. When I first started doing it I had to jig it for the entire nap but don't need to anymore. I know it would be better if they slept in the cot but I can't face the crying times two!

the problem is, nancy 54, we live on 2nd floor and pram is on ground floor so i can't bring it up for every nap.

thanks for the tips teacher. i think i will need to do a shortened version of bedtime routine (which itself we have only just started doing and is not going brilliantly as DS now thinks it is getting up time at 3 am! he used to go to bed when we did at ten ish...) waking every hour and a half from 7 (generally for a feed) when we put him to bed but that's another issue...

yeah cnix, it's just not the weather for walking 4 hours a day and i don't want to make a rod for my own back so want to break DS out of habit of only napping in pram now while he's still quite young...

Ah yes not ideal.

I was also trying to think of an alternative to the buggy naps because I often find when I get back from a walk I have to clean the wheels before putting it in the kitchen for the next nap and it is annoying.

However, having two of them, I can't really face trying to put them down upstairs in the cot. I have seen that you can get cots with wheels on and am considering buying one to put in the living room so I could put them in it and then rock them off like in the buggy. Don't know if it would work!