Catnappers and 'bad sleepers' support thread

[AwesomeSuperTasty]

This is inspired by this napping thread www.mumsnet.com/Talk/sleep/2123505-Any-advice-for-daytime-naps A user commented that they wanted to start a catnapping thread, but seeing as no one did, I thought I might start a 'support group' for all parents of catnapping babies and generally poor sleepers. (I hope the user who prompted this thought will come forward to claim the credit!)

Anyway, it's really just a place to vent and maybe share experiences.

So, I will start. My 7 month old son still catnaps 30 mins at a time, something he allegedly should have grown out of. He also wakes every 90 minutes at night, and wakes up at 5.30 in the mornings. He self settles to sleep and has an early bed time but can't resettle at night. Basically, since he was born, I've not slept longer than 2 hours at a stretch. I'm sure I'm pretty exhausted but stopped registering it.

I do have some questions for anyone who'd like to share.

• If you have an older catnapping baby, how long does she/he go between naps?

-Has anyone managed to sucessfully implement some kind of a napping schedule, for babies who sleep only 30 mins?

And please don't tell me to get a sling...or co-sleep

Thanks highlove, it really is nice to know there is someone out there who understands what it's like!

I've got a SIL with a 7 month old with severe reflux who screams blue murder every 2 hours through the night so I'm seen as the one with the "easy" baby so I'm never going to get much sympathy.

I'm currently camped out in the bedroom in bed with DS as decided to just fuck it and avoid the crying today and frustration of 20 minute cot sleeps and just feed him to sleep in bed.

He did 45 minutes this morning and then after 3 hours awake we're an hour 20 into another sleep - I stuck my boob in his mouth to resettle him after he woke at 30 minutes. He looks like he's in a really deep sleep at the moment bless him.

So a good day for him - a shit day for me, I've spent most of it in a darkened room again.

Hi all, typing quickly as I've got to get back to work asap.

But, just wanted to send virtual support to everyone.

Highlove - I totally get what you mean. You feel as though you're doing everything correctly, the self settling, the cot sleeping, whatever, and you still get crappy naps and loads of night wakings. I spent hours googling the problem and every time I see "put your baby down awake" [which I do] as a solution to catnaps and night wakings, I want to throw my laptop out of the window! And YY to feeling judged!! OMG! Not only in RL but some posts I've seen on MN are really judgy. I remember trying to cope with catnaps when I was at a very low point, and someone started a thread on 'AIBU to not get sleep advice given on MN' or something like that, and basically the post was all in the vein of 'my baby is a great sleeper, I don't get these parents whose babies don't sleep' and a bunch of posters with things like 'yeah, it's not rocket science/you'd think babies never sleep judging by MN/I don't want to tell people my baby is a a great sleeper/I don't know what the problem is, these parents must be doing something wrong if their babies are bad sleepers/ etc etc' and I really cried at reading that!

And, after our day of 2 long naps - nothing. Back to 30 min naps, even though everything was the same, the timings, the white noise whatever.

Then last night - wake ups. Every. Hour. To. The Minute. From 9pm to 6am. I was going bonkers. Ds would also not settle without the boob which drove me doubly bonkers. I always disliked bf and it was just something I had to do, and at night, I always resented it that for the longest time, it was the only thing that would resettle DS (also, he was /is still genuinely hungry twice a night). But last night, I was at breaking point, and I was seriously regretting that I started to bf, that I never did FF at night, etc etc.

At 4am I totally lost it. I started speaking to the baby as if he understood me, 'WHYYYYY don't you sleep, what's wrong' and I kind of snapped and really got mad at him. Then I cried and talked to myself in the dark, and that was my maddest moment of sleep deprivation.

I just could not figure out why he was waking. My friend with a DC the same age as my baby was saying, 'we had a few sleepless nights because of teething'. I was all how do you know it was teething?! Because, I often wonder if DS Is teething but how the hell do I know when he wakes all the time anyway, even when we give him calpol (when we thought the hourly wake ups were teething related, last week, but no obvious swollen gums or anything).

Ugh! Just had to vent. I feel like a total failure today. Can't even get any work done as I am so tired that I am barely keeping my head above the desk.

We've been dealt a particularly crap hand, haven't we chaps?

We do Everything-and I mean EVERYTHING-we're told to do: put down awake, don't feed to sleep, feed to sleep, co/-sleep, pupd, lots of love, tough love, gradual retreat, complete darkness and silence, distraction, routine, letting them drop...the advice out there is so conflicting and absolutely everyone thinks they know best. It is bloody infuriating.

I've found family members to be the absolute worst with their judgement. MIL (who has 6 kids) never tires of telling me that DS should be sleeping through by now (this has been her bloody mantra since he was 6 weeks old). None of her children were still waking in the night at 7 months; if they didn't take their bottle they'd just go hungry; solids by 6 weeks blah blah blah. Apparently I've brought the hyper alert-reflux-crap sleeper baby on myself as I've "allowed", nae, I've encouraged (!) him to be this way.

Mrs, I feel so rotten for you. It's properly awful to think that you've made progress and for it to revert back to its initial shitty state. The one thing I've taken from mental DS is that his timeline doesn't remotely correspond with what a normal child his age will do, rather he'll do it on his individual timescale of "when I'm bloody ready, mother". Don't despair that he's not clicked back to the pre-camping incarnation of DS; I just think it takes our lot a whole lot longer to deal with change. While my DS is racing ahead in lots of other ways, he cannot abide the little changes.

Awesome- I'm REALLY guilty of Calpol overload. Anytime he's remotely pissy, we dose him up and I can honestly say that he's only visibly teethed for a week or so. The rest of the time he's practically been stuffing his fist in his mouth and dribbling constantly so I just attribute it to his teeth.

DS has got a stuffy nose so, of course, that means he's refusing to go to sleep. A long night stretches forth....

My god we are 2 hours into a nap. How is this even possible! You'd think I'd be thrilled but now I'm just wondering where the hell we go with naps for the rest of the day!?

Seems like it's been a particularly shit week for everyone. Much sympathy to all! Things have improved and got worse all at the same time, here.

She's sort of sleeping through at the moment. I'm not fooled. She's done this before. Give me a few days of brilliant sleeping and then back to rubbish. When she went back down at 6:25am this morning I laid her on the bed next to me, and tried the hand on her chest thing again. Think it got another ten minutes out of her but it didn't seem very restful. Now she is, of course, COMPLETELY out of sync for the day, and I'm going to have to keep her awake for longer before her last nap (buggy), and then try and get her to sleep for an hour instead of 45mins... basically by walking and not stopping even for a second or those blue eyes ping open and I'm buggered (this happened yesterday when Mum came with me and we stopped under a tree to escape the rain for a minute, hence a shorter nap and a crankier baby for the rest of the day).

She's also now getting up far too early, meaning she's shattered by bedtime and goes to bed earlier. Fine, gives me more evening time. But this ALSO means she gets up EVEN EARLIER the next morning, then to bed earlier, and so it goes. The other day it was 4:40am. This one I accept as she had been sick before she fell asleep (Daddy dared to try and settle her for bed - which had been going well - but she wouldn't tolerate it and screamed so much she threw up EVERYWHERE, all over the fresh sheets I had put on our bed about ten minutes previously). It did seem to 'reset' her a bit because the next day it was closer to 6am. Then it was 5:45am. Then 5:30am. Tomorrow morning I am anticipating seeing 5:15am on my clock when I open my eyes. However this is definitely preferable to the up-in-the-night-for-two-hours nonsense of before.

I spend most of my 'free' time glued to the monitor after I made a horrifying discovery that sometimes she doesn't sleep for 45mins. Sometimes she sleeps for 30mins and lays awake chatting to herself before she calls for me! Those 15mins make all the difference as I'm sure you all appreciate. She's due up any second and I'm sitting here listening to the white noise over the monitor, waiting for an "ooohhhhh!" or an "aaaahhh!"... I love the first half an hour after she's woken up, the rest mostly sucks.

And I just know that everyone (except husband, thankfully, and Mum has stopped saying such helpful things as "well, she'll need less sleep as she gets older!" and "you didn't sleep much in the day, but you slept all night!") thinks I'm OTT on the sleeping issue, but they don't have to deal with her moodiness when she's gone over her awake time and should be sleeping. I will never, ever trust a HV again after one of them said, "Well, have you tried just getting her to sleep longer?"

Jesus wept.

(The second I posted that, I heard "murrrrrrrrrrgghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!" over the monitor. I think I'm in for a fun afternoon...)

Another one here guilty of being too quick with the calpol sometimes. I spend so much time with a whingy, unhappy little girl that I'll do anything to take the edge off for her and me.

Ah how I'd love the luxury of being able to judge other how other parents manage their child's sleep. Only somebody with a pretty good sleeper would be able to do that.

Pickle, I also want to scream at all the advice. I've tried every sodding variable - more wake time, less wake time, feeding to sleep, putting down awake, pupd, hand on chest to settle her back off, trying to feed her back off, letting her grisle and even cry for a minute or so, going in and out to settle her, whatever. This baby just can't sleep more than 45 mins (generally much less) during the day.

Awesome, don't feel bad - I think many of us with a persistently shit sleeper have at some point snapped/let our frustration show. I know I have. Normally pleading with her to just go to sodding sleep. And then sobbed like a baby for being an awful mum. I like to think that on balance the good stuff outweighs the bad.

So for us today started ok. Two naps in the cot, down like a dream both times. 35 mins then 40. Then I had to pop out and for various reasons wake time ran to over two hours. Next nap was more if a battle and lasted 25 mins. Followed by a 30 minute battle to try and get her back off before I pulled the plug. An hours play time then back down (so 90 mins wake time) which resulted in a whopping, life-changing ten minutes, a 15 minute feed and shh to settle her back down for a further ten minutes. I've given up and we'll try an early bedtime but no doubt I'll be in and out because she's over-tired and will wake crying every ten minutes. Deep joy.

Coddle, your HV sounds helpful. I think I'd have cried.

Highlove, she's not the best HV... In fact she makes me want to punch things. She's sling, bath and routine obsessed. She also asked me how much sleep DD gets in a day, and asked me why I didn't think that was enough. Erm, because it bloody well isn't? (Annoyingly DD decided to sleep the entire time she was here.) I've avoided her ever since.

"Do you a bedtime routine? You must have a bedtime routine. YOU MUST!!!"
"We do, it's working-"
"YOU MUST!!! AND IT MUST INCLUDE A BATH!"
"Oh no, they wind her up too much to do befo-"
"IT MUST INCLUDE A BATH!!!!!!!!"

In the end I just gave up and said okay. She hasn't had a bedtime bath since she was about two months old!

And I know how you feel about trying EVERYTHING. 45mins is the magic number for us, with VERY occasional naps that are longer or shorter. Does yours start smiling and wanting to play the second she sees you after a nap? I used to try ignoring her and getting her back to sleep, but after two weeks of her just sitting on my lap I gave up.

Awesome, I've snapped at mine more than once. Normally of the "Why won't you fucking go to sleep?!" variety. Feel terrible at the time but I force myself not to feel guilty as sleep deprivation can make you say all kinds of crap.

Sorry to post again but I need something to keep my mind off of it.

Husband is trying to get her to bed. She was doing so well since we made a concerted effort, but is now screaming the house down. She does that to me at bedtime sometimes but this is what made her throw up the other day (alright, so it was the nappy change)... I can hear her alternating between screaming/crying/whinging over the monitor and it's making me antsy, purely because Saturday night. She woke up from her nap at 5:05pm so should be ready for bed now but she's working herself up so much.

I know sometimes Mummy is who they want but... YOU'VE HAD ME ALL DAY. AND IT'S DADDY. YOU KNOW WHO DADDY IS!

I've got a feeling I'll be up there camping on the floor in a minute. Or taking over because that's what she wants. Sigh.

Coddle that sounds tough, how did it go in the end?

Your HV sounds annoying, but the scene you describe made me laugh. Luckily our hvs are pretty good, though their explanations for catnaps is: 'some babies are like that' [shrug].

Got to get some sleep now so will catch up with all messages in the morning!

Awe

Awes

Argh, stupid phone! Awesome, it was okay in the end. I went up and sat on the floor but after about twenty minutes she went down and slept until just before 6am! And now she's been asleep for 90mins! I don't know what to do with myself. Of course this is the morning I decided not to have a nap with her but you can't have everything...

Just praying this doesn't put her out for the rest of the day (I'm never happy, apparently!).

Crack put the bunting - we've just had a 15 minute morning nap.

Ugh.

Argh Mrsmugoo I feel your pain - we had that yesterday afternoon. Just long enough to make her not sleepy so impossible to get back down. Nowhere near long enough to actually give her the rest she needs.

So this morning...almost textbook. Went upstairs for first nap at 1hr20 as starting to eye rub and get fussy. Ten minute feed. Put down awake. Ten minutes of babbling and then very gentle whinging in the cot, I returned once for about 30 seconds to shhh her. She went off by herself. Woke on the dot of 30 minutes, clearly desperate to go back to sleep but just couldn't. I left her till she started to cry then went in and shhh/patted until we gave up after 15 mins because she was getting increasingly upset and it all seemed a bit pointless, clearly wasn't going to happen. Where in all that did I go wrong?!

Now rocking her in the pushchair in the dining room. She's nodded off. Debating going to make a cup of tea but worried if I stop she'll wake.

Fuck fuck fuck it. God this is frustrating.

One dose of ibuprofen, loud white noise and a lie down feed and he's asleep.

I'm trying to pack for a week at my parents and a grumpy overtired baby is making it very hard!!

Now we're "off schedule" (is this a late first nap or early second nap) so god knows how the rest of the day will pan out? I can see myself pounding the pavements with him in the pushchair later.

And to think we actually had a great night last night with only one night feed? Good nights don't lead to good days here :(

25 minutes. How long do I carry on rocking the pushchair in the hope she'll go off again?

Mrs, we're also off to see family. God knows what that will do to already buggered sleeping. DH and I have already rowed about, so that helps. I need to get less stressed about it, apparently. He's probably right but it still pissed me off.

The really frustrating thing is that even if you do exactly the same thing you did the day before, you get different results! Twice this last week she's woken up from her second nap after about 30 mins and with about 15 minutes of shhing and me sitting in the room with her she's dropped back off for another hour. But she won't do it every day!

Because her naps are only a maximum of 45 minutes each she's in bed by 6.30 most nights as she's exhausted. I won't let her have a nap after 4.30 otherwise bedtime ends up 7.30/8 and I need my evenings to myself! Thankfully DH will be back at the end of September so I'll have some help!

That lasted less than half an hour. I honestly feel like crying.

Oh you must be SO looking forward to your DH coming back!

Mine just left for 2 weeks today :(

Oh definitely, though I'm so used to doing everything myself now that I probably won't know what to do myself! Hope the next 2 weeks are speedy for you.

Having written my earlier post DD is now into the second half if her lunchtime nap. She did 35 minutes, woke up then went back to sleep 15 minutes later! She's stirred a few times and I've been back up to pop her dummy back in and give her a quick "shh" and so far so good

Tiredness meltdown after 90 minutes awake here.

Give me strength why won't this baby sleep????

Oh god I really am having a shit day today. I've just fed him to sleep because he was completely unmanageable.

I took the gamble of lifting him into the cot so I wouldn't have to spend more time sitting in the dark reading the sodding daily mail on my iPad while he sleeps and of course he woke straight up.

He's now doing his "I'm so tired I can't even control my own body" compulsive rolling every 5 bloody minutes.

I'm at the end of my tether. I just don't want to be traipsing out with the pushchair for hours, it's raining, I'm tired and I've got shit to do.

In tears and hating my life right now.

Oh mrs, sounds like you are having a shitty day. Walk in the pushchair? Will he stay asleep if you stop for coffee and cake?

Frankel - absolutely. Do frustrating that there's no bloody rhyme or reason why something works once or twice and then doesn't.

Quick question: does trying to resettle your babies after a nap inevitably end in tears? It does here and just doesn't seem to be working at the moment, whatever I try.