How long to settle for naps?

[MadamoiselleMango]

Dd is 6 months and is currently taking half an hour to settle for naps which only last 40 mins in length, it doesn't seem like a good pay off...I don't think I'm putting her down too early, normally around 1.5 hours after her last nap and I know she's tired because she's doing all the tired signs!

It's driving me nuts, is this a normal amount of time? It used to only take 10 mins or so.

She doesn't sleep great at night and wakes up for the day yawning so I feel like she's constantly tired and am terrified of her getting overtired.

Agh bloody sleep!

I feel like sleeping through or having long naps is just a pipe dream at the moment.

Oh and she's not crying, just blowing raspberries and constantly taking her dummy out to play with it

I'm guessing 1.5 hours after waking is possibly too short a time to be awake for a 6m old. Have you tried extending the awake time to 1h45 or 2h? My 5.5 m baby is a 40 minute napper as well, it is frustrating! His awake time is just under 2 hours and he tends to settle for a nap pretty quickly. Or how about naps in the pram or sling?

Hey OP,,

I found with my DD that at around 6 months she needed more awake time, like your LO she was catnapping and taking ages to settle. I started lengthening awake times and found that her naps condensed, she dropped down to 2 x 90min naps and drifted into the 234 routine pretty easily. I read somewhere that sometimes what looks like sleep signals can be boredom signals, that was definitely the case with me, I was so terrified she would get over tired that I was too quick to whisk her to bed, which just pissed her off and often resulted in her going batshit for 45 minutes!

Ok that's promising! I'll try for longer awake times and see how it goes..I think i just got nervous as she had an overtired meltdown the other day which she's not done in ages...also she is always SO tired by about half 5 I can barely string her out to half 6 and I have to carry her around most of the last hour as she'll just whinge/cry if I put her down anywhere. But if she consolidated naps that wild surely help.

She will nap in the buggy but only for half an hour or so. She'll sleep in the sling too but no longer than 40 mins so I figure I might as well get her to nap in the cot.

Oh I should say she's not quite 6 months but will be next Friday but maybe she's getting to that point. God I'd love her to nap for 90mins so I can have a little snooze myself...

Don't be too quick to whisk her out of bed when she wakes. The sleep cycle is, I think, about 45 min in infants, so the key to a 90 min nap is that the child perhaps half wakes and then snoozes off again. I use a white noise thing and make sure it's set low but for the longest possible setting, and rewind it.