When she grows out of the bouncy chair...?

[HerculesParrot]

I'm doing a lot of posting about my 8.5 month old at the moment! This one is more of a future worry, but I wonder if anyone has any advice.

She currently naps in a bouncy chair and I have no other reliable way of getting her off, but she's not going to fit in the damn thing much longer and I'm not sure where we go from here. I'm currently working on not feeding her to sleep at night, which is going slowly and isn't much fun (I was happy enough doing it, but it was becoming impossible to get her into cot without waking her, so we had to start working on settling her in-cot.) Sling and pushchair don't work anymore - she's too interested in what's happening around her. She's never taken a dummy and rocking/cuddling/singing seems to just signal playtime. At night I mostly feed her then, if she wakes up, sit with hand on her chest till she goes off. It can take up to half an hour.

I don't want to get into half hour battles for every daytime nap but not sure how long the bouncer will last us! Anyone been through similar and found a good alternative? We're very much in a transition phase sleep-wise, and I feel like I'm starting to find my way through, but it's a bit of a bumpy ride!

I was doing several things simultaneously to transition naps to the cot. For us, it has hapoened by 6 months old, aside from the third teatime power nap, until that was dropped.

• I'd keep naps in the bouncer until they are consistantly longer than 90 minutes without needing a resettle. Resettling yo to lengthen naps is infinitely more difficult in the cot.

• once resettles are working (so usually sleeping 90m plus, but often with a resettle back to sleep in the middle), start reducing the amount/intensity/duration of the bouncing at the start of the nap.

I did that by replacing the comfort of movement with the comfort of dummy sucking. The aim is to get to the point of just put in bouncer, given dummy and not mych else needed for sleep.

Without the dummy, the theory would be replace with comforter-you snuggles, but I can't see that being a fail-safe until gone 12 months. So I don't know how this will work in practice.

• as all this was happening with daytime naps, I was also doing in-cot settling at bedtime. Still with me there, but with just dummy sucking for comfort. Again, I can't comment on the practicality of this working without a dummy.

• I was also night weaning (and ever increasing daytime feeds at the same time) so that night wakes also involves in-cot settling and not feeding/cuddling to sleep. I still did nights with a feed in, but not every night and not every wake up.

All this came together at around 5-6 months old for us. I then moved the morning nap (usually the easiest) into the cot, the afternoon nap following within a couple of weeks, once I knew baby could:

• sleep for 90m plus without a resettle
• didn't need much bouncing to get to sleep.
• could go to sleep in the cot at night without a battle
• could be resettled in the cot, if needed

Well, I can build a strategy from that, even if we're in a slightly different place! Her naps are still all over the shop at the moment - anything from 40 minutes to 2 hours. We were here before then she reverted to 30 minutes for a while. We're heading in the right direction again, but I hope we get there before the poor kid is hanging over the sides of the chair!