4 month old nap nightmare

[soontobeamum1982]

My baby is four months old next week. She's pretty good at night time sleep (usually off to sleep next to us in the lounge by 8pm latest, wake her for BF between 11 and midnight, and maybe one more feed early morning, around 6am, and back to sleep for an hour), but days are a different story. She fights all naps and the longest I can get out of her is usually 45 mins mid morning. Then she cat naps the rest of the day, but by the end of the day definitely hasn't had enough and between 5pm and bedtime she whines and moans due to being over tired.
Is this part of the dreaded four month sleep regression I've heard about? Is it normal for naps to go belly up at this stage?
I've tried a lot of things: napping in the pram, in the crib, in the sling, in the bouncy chair. The crib is the worst; she just yells when I put her down. Also, other than bedtime routine, i'm not big on mega strict routines as our days are different due to my OH working on a changing shift pattern, and the different baby classes we do. I also don't want her to become so inflexible (eg never napping in the pram) that I can't leave the house; I'm used to being busy and worried about becoming isolated on mat leave.
I'm concerned she's not getting enough sleep but other than being consistent in trying to get her off at the first yawn, I'm not sure what else to try. Any ideas?

Have you tried playing white noise? It's a life saver for us it always helps when he's over tired and I can't get him to nap I just lay him down and play it quite loud and leave it on the whole time he naps works a treat for us

It sounds like she's already very overtired by the time you do the first nap and then just gets progressively more user hired as the day continues.

Poor sleep spirals to make sleep even worse. So a baby shower us over tired us harder how get to sleep and then once asleep wakes more easily. So naps end up getting harder and harder.

The way to reduce over tiredness is your reduce awake time between naps. The nap being short (30-45m) isn't that much of a problem, just make the naps frequent.

You should be getting baby to sleep about half an hour before seeing any outward tired signs. Tired signs mean baby is over tired, joy want baby asleep at the just-got tired point, before and signs. It's like anticipating when a nap will be needed.

As a general rule at thus age I'd estimate a 1h awake time between naps, expecting naps if 30-45m.

If baby sleeps longer, awake time may extend but the maximum awake time would be 90 minutes from last waking. If baby has a very short nap that you can't resettle back to sleep, say 20m, then expect awake time to be less. Say 40m.

I had this with my DD until recently (she's now 6 months). The trick is to put them down to nap before they're showing signs of being tired as once they do, they're overtired and will struggle to sleep.

I got round this by deciding that DD at 4 months would nap 1.5 hours after waking in the morning. I persevered with this and got that nap sorted then the afternoon nap followed much more easily... Sleep begets sleep.

All babies are different but my baby needs to be put in her cot and left alone to go to sleep. She will grumble for a couple of minutes then quieten down.

We still have occasional days where she fights it so it's into the pushchair for a walk.
But we are in a much better place now (I'd had days where she was awake for 12 hours straight ). I think they need to get used to the idea that they will be napping every day, which requires persistence on our part!