Please help!

[mdtl]

Dd is almost 18 weeks old.
Waking time has usually been 6.40 and now is 5am :(
If 5, I take her into bed and she falls asleep on me but wakes If put down.

Awake time during day 1.5 hrs or sooner if she looks tired. Takes her about 20/25 mins to fall asleep.
If she hasn’t fallen asleep by then I pick her up and she sleeps on me. Cot naps are 30 mins, on me can be 2 hrs +

Bedtime routine at 6.30pm. During or immediately after she will start crying, really intense, in our arms and in the cot. Ends up falling asleep on me when I pick her up for comfort. Then will sometimes wake within an hour after put down, crying until we resettle her. She falls asleep anywhere between 7.30pm and 9pm after getting herself into a complete state.

She sleeps 10/10.5 hours at night so I’m loathe to put her down earlier as she might wake earlier, does that make sense?

We have no routine/schedule for the day but I’d very much like one! Please where I am going wrong that makes bedtime such a struggle? Bedtime itself? Awake time? Help!

You seem to have got the idea that the timing of daytime naps is down your awake time, rather than 'by the clock'. So instead of saying, for example, "first nap is 8am", you recognise that nap time happens after about 90min awake time.

So you just need to carry this through to bedtime. Instead of having a set time for bedtime, you need (for now) be flexible depending on how naps have gone that day.

For example if you follow your day along the lines of:

• wake
• 1h awake time
• up to 30m settling to sleep time
• nap time
• wake and repeat, over and over again all day long...

... eventually you'll have an awake time hour that falls somewhere around 6pm-8pm. It's got to be flexible, because your naps are flexible. Try to stretch that awake time a bit, maybe only half an hour, because your awake time just before bed wants to be a tad longer than the rest. Not too long though because being overtired brings extra problems.

During this awake time, whatever time it falls, do bathtime or massage (or whatever you do) in this awake time and use the time to change into bedclothes. Then at the end of the 90 ish minutes awake time, settle for bedtime as you would a nap.

Thank you that’s helpful, I’ll
Give that a try tonight!