4 month old - how do you manage daytime naps?

[Writerwannabe83]

I have a 4 month old baby and his daytime naps are totally hit and miss.

Some days he will practically sleep all day, other days he will be awake all morning but sleep 3-5 hours in the afternoon and other days he will just have a few 1/2 cat naps which seem pointless.

My question is this : where do you put your baby for their daytime naps and how do you encourage sleep?

My DS looked a bit tired at 11.30am so I gave him a nice feed and then put him in the Moses Basket which is in the living room. He didn't cry or scream, but just flailed his arms and legs around whilst laughing and chortling. However, 45 minutes later he is still doing the exact same thing.

At what point am I supposed to take him out and accept that he just isn't going to sleep?

In the end, after an hour of him being awake in his Moses basket and still giggling away to himself I just took him out.

Should I be putting him in his Crib in the bedroom and leaving him there in a dark and quiet room to sleep instead? But if so, would that not affect his ability to differentiate night from day?

Some and DH are getting a bit stressed by his sleeping routines (day and night) and am just interested in other people's experiences.

He just never, ever seems tired. On many, many occasions he can happily be awake for the entire day without having a sleep or even a small nap.

We seem to have turned a corner in that over the last few days he has taken 3-4 naps a day. They aren't long ones, ranging from 30-60 minutes but it's better than nothing!

We introduced a dummy when he was about 4-5 weeks old which definitely helped with nighttime feeding but since he was 10 weeks old he has refused to take it.

That's excellent, and really normal! Probably more in the realms of "normal" than those mammoth 3-4 hour sleeps he was doing in the day tbh.

I've been told a lot of babies do not start doing longer naps (1.5.-2hrs) until they drop down to 2 per day when they consolidate a bit.

that's good news. I have been lurking on your other thread so I have seen some of your sleep issues recently...

Sometimes I can re-settle DD and convince her to have another sleep cycle if she wakes after 40 mins. Doesn't always work but putting the dummy back in and a bit of patting and shushing (can take 10 mins but worth persevering) she will more often than not, go back to sleep. Occasionally she will do a 2hr nap, say once a week, without me intervening.
She is 15 weeks this week so we are about to head into regression territory I expect.

He's had toe naps so far today, the first was 30 minutes and the second was 45 minutes - and that one was in his cot.

If you are heading towards the regression curly I hope it's not too painful